nuclear powered soup kitchen

“ Back in the old days when TV signals were analogue and got turned into a picture by a bunch of magnets waving a beam of electrons about all over the place, it was impossible to guarantee that all TV sets were adjusted correctly and so you couldn't assume that the edges of a picture would actually be visible to the viewer. In order to put text on screen without risking bits of it being lost, you had to steer clear of the edges. Over time this became roughly standardised and the areas of the signal that weren't expected to be displayed were called overscan. Now, of course, we're in a mostly digital world and such things can be ignored, except that when digital TVs first appeared they were mostly used to watch analogue signals so still needed to overscan because otherwise you'd have the titles floating weirdly in the middle of the screen rather than towards the edges, and so because it's never possible to kill technology that's escaped into the wild we're stuck with it.

tl;dr - Your 1920x1080 TV takes a 1920x1080 signal, chops the edges off it and then stretches the rest to fit the screen because of decisions made in the 1930s.

So you plug your computer into a TV and even though you know what the resolution really is you still don't get to address the individual pixels. Even worse, the edges of your screen are missing.

[…]

The best thing about all of this is that the same TV will often have different behaviour depending on whether you connect via DVI or HDMI, but some TVs will still overscan DVI. Some TVs have options in the menu to disable overscan and others don't. Some monitors will overscan if you feed them an HD resolution over HDMI, so if you have HD content and don't want to lose the edges then your hardware needs to scale it down and let the display scale it back up again. It's all awful. I recommend you drink until everything's already blurry and then none of this will matter. ”

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