Mac Mini and Sony Bravia XBR issues

A lot of people seem to be having ever so much trouble getting their Mac Minis to use their Sony Bravia LCD Televisions as displays. For some reason, when connected to a Mini via an HDMI-to-DVI cable, the Bravia appears to the Mini to have a native resolution of 1280×720. While that is, in fact, a 16:9 resolution, it leaves anyone wanting a good-looking picture in the dust. Unfortunately, the Mini only has two options: overscan mode, which pushes the menu bar and the dock off the screen, or no overscan, which makes the picture significantly smaller than the television is, leaving a couple of inches of black all around.

After downloading SwitchResX and DisplayConfigX, and a couple of hours of Googling, I discovered that HDMI ports on Bravia TVs just don’t seem to like any resolutions except 1280×720. After the third attempt that just resulted in a black screen, it occurred to me that I might try using the “RGB/PC” input on the Bravia, which is actually a standard VGA port. After plugging the VGA cable into the TV on one end and the Mini’s DVI to VGA adapter on the other end, I restarted the Mini to discover… a perfect screen. At 1366×768, the Bravia’s native resolution, no less. The computer is sending 1 pixel for every pixel on the TV. Front Row is beautiful, and DVD Player fills the whole screen. Hurrah.

Hopefully this will help all the people out there looking for instructions on how to set up a custom resolution to force their TV to work with their Mini, since it turns out you don’t need to at all.

Here’s a picture of the full-resolution, full-screen result:

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Published:
May 6th 03:55 PM
Updated:
July 10th 01:05 PM
Sections:
macintosh media personal