The other day I was translating late night and I had to use my headphones to catch a few lines. However the output from the jack of my speakers was so crappy that I rather decided to rather fetch my HDMI cable and connect my screen using that, then use the screen’s audio output. Why didn’t I use HDMI until now, even though it’s supposed to be superior?

That’s quite simple. I tried connecting it once, then this quite big black frame showed up. I couldn’t fix it instantly so I just gave up and rather connected using the analog cable. This time I didn’t give up so easily and googled. It took me a while to figure out what this black frame thing was called at all, and then how to solve it.

It’s called underscan (related to overscan, in which case (I think) there are parts “off” the screen), and it’s a pain in the ass to fix. On Windows it’s in the ATi Catalyst control center, Graphics > Desktops & Displays, right click on the screen > Configure > Scaling.

On Ubuntu, i couldn’t find any relevant options in the control panel GUI so i terminal’d. I tried two commands, aticonfig -set-pcs-val=MCIL,DigitalHDTVDefaultUnderscan,0 and aticonfig -tv-overscan=off. Then I rebooted and it was all right. Dunno which one did the trick.