Jukka Vaisanen wrote:
HDMI uses DVI signalling for the video (and audio is hidden in a vertical blanking time slot believe it or not) so it may seem like just another connector.. however in their finite wisdom the HDMI standardization people decided that HDMI will not support arbitrary resolutions, but instead only the existing (and back then, planned) broadcast resolutions:
HDMI interface does not limit the resolutions (TMDS link max. speed of course does but is another matter). It's mostly the "HD Ready" and "Full HD" television implementations that support only CEA-861-D modes for HDTV. Nothing would prevent HDTVs to introduce other modes in EDID and EDID extension blocks similarly as DVI computer monitors do. Though the timings would need be defined in such way that there is space for audio.
Fortunately full HD televisions typically support 1:1 pixels over HDMI so the limited amount of modes is not that bad. GFX cards will scale other resolutions such as 800x600 and 1024x768 VESA modes into the native panel resolution.
My 2c: I'm watching also a HD ready television from 2005 and despite of 2x scaling the difference with DVB PAL content is minimal to my other full HD television with only one scaling operation. The quality of the SDTV DVB-T/S content is IMHO the bottleneck instead of video scalers. Also non 1:1 pixels Gnome desktop is usable. Of course 1 pixel wide too small fonts must be avoided.
BR, Seppo