Chosen Solution
So, my Panasonic 42" Plasma will do 720p and I have my Mac Mini hooked up and ready to go. The Snow Leopard 720p preset looks great except the menu bar at the top of my screen is mostly missing. Is there third party software or some hidden setting that will allow me to have more precise control of the output to fit the TV dimensions properly?
Brady, check to see if there is an option to turn off overscan on your TV. this will let you gain back the ~5% you lose to overscan.
I also have a mac mini attached to an LCD TV. Go to display settings In the system prefs of the mac, and make sure that overscan is checked “on” in the options tab.. On the TV, make sure its set to “dot by dot” or whatever setting correctly maps the pixels 1 to 1. In other words, all zooming and other resizing features must be off. On my TV, the setting is called “view mode”, and I cycle through until “dot by dot” is selected.
This page explains why, sadly, a TV will never look as good as a monitor, when hooked up to a computer. http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/8705.html Long story short, lots of legacy TV and broadcasting baggage means a “television”, even with a nice, perfect, digital HDMI connection, won’t ever be sharp. UPDATE, December 2020: IGNORE MY OLD COMMENT ABOVE. (Unless you’re trying to connect an old computer to an old TV.) A lot has changed in 8 years. This actually works now. TVs no longer run at the odd resolution of 1366x768. Most are one of the two actual HD resolutions: 1280x720 or 1920x1080. These can be run just fine via HDMI. You can even run a 4k display as long as you have good enough cables. You might still need to check for overscan settings.
Does not the ‘detect display’s button in system preferences automatically determine the screen dimensions necessary? And have you checked that the aspect ratio of your TV is possible for the mini?
If your TV has an ’exotic’ resolution, use SwitchResX to fit it exactely.
