Intel Mac mini, Panasonic plasma, Overscan solution

I recently got my Mac mini media center set up and running and it’s pretty nifty but there was one nagging issue I had not yet solved, until now!

I have a Mac mini core duo (early 2006, 1.66 Ghz) hooked up to my Panasonic TH-42PD50U EDTV plasma as a media center. Out of the box, just hooking up all the wires gets you most of the way there but the overscan issue makes it so the picture is larger than the TV screen by enough pixels all the way around to be annoying though still usable. There’s software called DisplayConfigX that lets you set up custom resolutions for situations like this but it’s very complicated and I wasn’t able to make it work myself. Well now the magic of the Internet has allowed me to stumble upon the answer.

To help out any others in need of this same information, here are the settings I ended up using. It’s not a perfect fit for my TV but it’s very close and might be as close as is possible. I may try some other settings later myself but I am more likely to just be lazy and use what other people figured out.

My DisplayConfigX settings:

Horizontal

• 1224 pixels
• 136 front porch
• 80 sync
• 208 back porch

Vertical

• 690 pixels
• 26 front porch
• 5 sync
• 29 back porch

Updated Jan 1, 2007 with my most up to date setup!