TV and laptop

[Peter Linu]

Hiyall,
I am trying to get a laptop working on a TV via a HDMI cable. Two apparent problems;
1. While the image on my laptop's screen fills the screen, the image on the TV fills less than half of the screen.
Is this a TV control that I can manipulate or is it as good as it gets?
2. I have been told that the TV image will be very poor because the laptop's inbuilt camera is probably only 840x640.

I will need to buy a 3m cable for it to run from the TV to the couch. Not inexpensive. I'd like to know my options BEFORE I spend the money.
Any help out there?

[ThaCrip]

I am trying to get a laptop working on a TV via a HDMI cable. Two apparent problems;
1. While the image on my laptop's screen fills the screen, the image on the TV fills less than half of the screen.
Is this a TV control that I can manipulate or is it as good as it gets?
2. I have been told that the TV image will be very poor because the laptop's inbuilt camera is probably only 840x640.

If I recall correctly, it's possible you may need to adjust a certain setting on the TV itself as on my LG brand TV to get things to work properly I had to switch a setting to 'just scan' for it to work as it should. this might vary a bit from brand to brand though.

but I think it's best to have the laptop off, then connect HDMI, boot up laptop and then tweak things to your liking. you should be able to do it from 'Display'. you might need to adjust the screens shown on the 'Layout' which you can drag around things so that you can drag out of the screen from the left to right or right to left on however you like things. but given the way my physical setup is... monitor on the left and TV towards the right, I have mine setup so I drag things out the right side of my monitor and it goes into the TV. but if the TV was to the left of monitor I would have it drag out the left side of monitor. since that's more of a natural way that things are optimally setup. either way, you can do what you want.

also, make sure that 'Display' is using the max resolution for your laptop and TV for maximum benefit. just left click each to adjust them. because if I recall correctly when I was doing this on my laptop for example (which just uses the built-in driver that comes with Mint by default since there is no additional drivers available) the resolution on the TV side tends to be lowered and makes the image quality noticeably worse. but once I tweaked it so it's using the TV's proper resolution (i.e. 1920x1080 (1080p)) it looks noticeably better (which now works as it should) then and you get maximum image quality that way.

bottom line... if Mint is working properly you should definitely be able to get full screen on your laptop and TV screens even though you might need to manually adjust the resolution and might need to tweak a setting in your TV settings.

p.s. one time I had a bug going from Mint v20.1-Xfce and upgraded to Mint v20.2-Xfce as after I upgraded there was some weird bug that I could not get things to display normally (like between laptops screen and the TV), which I noticed was fixed after a clean install of Mint v20.2-Xfce. but at this point I just switched to Mint v20.2-Cinnamon since it's probably a safer all-around choice. so if your on Xfce and having issues, it might be worth giving Cinnamon a shot instead as I think it's the best all-around choice for Mint users regardless of whether your using more of a lower end PC or higher end. but come to think of it... if you think your Mint install is potentially out of whack you can always temporarily boot to Mint from bootable USB and test things briefly from there to see if it reacts any differently vs your current installation.

I will need to buy a 3m cable for it to run from the TV to the couch. Not inexpensive. I'd like to know my options BEFORE I spend the money.

On my main PC, which has a Geforce 1050 Ti 4GB GPU... I got a 20' HDMI cable (it's at least 15' but I am pretty sure it's 20'), so about 6.1m, to the TV and my monitor runs on DisplayPort. both are 1080p and pretty much work well. I don't remember what I paid for the HDMI cable but it was not expensive. just make sure to get it online and not in a local store since if you buy it in a local store they are usually marked up in price quite a bit vs buying one online.