I recently bought a widescreen TV and it has three modes of operation. Normal, Panarama & Wide. Panarama is a strange stretched mode where the screen is stretched more on the sides and less in the middle so it is pretty much useless. The normal mode when watching normal 4:3 TV shows has black bars at the sides instead of the top/bottom in normal letterboxing. The wide mode fills the screen by stretching the source out horizontally.
When I hook the TV output (S-Video or Composite) to this new TV I can see the 640x480 output from the ATI Radeon 8500 in any of these modes. In standard mode I get the bars at the left and right as I would expect. When I set it to wide mode the desktop is stretched so all the icons are wider than they are tall. This is also what I would expect. Is there anywhere within the OS or ATI's utilities where I could set the Pixel aspect ratio of the output so that on my computer monitor everything would be tall and thin so that when I output to the wide-screen TV it stretches it back to normal?
I realize that when playing movies through VLC or MPlayerX I can do exactly this so everything looks great, but it would be nice to be able to do this systemwide.
I remember using a mac in the past where I could choose odd resolutions like 1600x768 or something like that and when I selected those modes everything on the monitor was tall and thin, just like what I want. When I go into the Monitors control panel even if I don't choose "Show only resolutions that this monitor can display I don't seem to have any resolutions that are not 4:3.
Has anyone else found a solution to this issue? It would seem to be a common issue since wide-screen TVs are getting more and more mainstream every day.
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