SwitchResX - 4.0.0

First, I want to clarify something about this utility that many people misunderstand.

The installation and use of APE (an low-level application enhancer with various OS and application plugins) is not required. I note many persons who say they will not use this utility because of this issue. You don't have to use it unless you intend to block certain resolutions or unless you intend to redirect requests for certain resolutions into other resolutions automatically. This is not what most people need a custom display driver for.

You may choose during installation to avoid installing APE altogether. It is clearly marked and you must authorize its installation separately from the rest of SwitchRes. So it won't just sneak APE in on you during the install. And you can remove APE at any time if you don't require those few features that use APE.

I use an older 32" Sharp LCD TV as a second display. Its native EDID only goes as high as 1280x768 (not sure if newer Sharp units have corrected this problem). However, the TV can actually display up to 1366x768. Due to needing multiples of 8, most display tweakers choose to use a resolution of 1360x768 for sets of this type. So I wanted to get rid of my black bars and fill the Sharp screen border to border without stretching, banding artifacts, etc.

My primary machine is a 2006 model Mac Pro with an nVidia 7300LE dual-headed display card. The Mac Pro is running a current standard 10.5.4 Leopard install.

Using the mostly straightforward directions I found around the net (like AVSforums: Switchres), I concocted my own set of defaults simply by changing the horizontal front porch and back porch to allow the extra 80 pixels of width I needed.

I ended up with a setup like this:

	Mode = 1360 x 768 @ 59.833Hz
		Pixel Clock............. 81.00 MHz		Non-Interlaced

		                        Horizontal		Vertical
		Active.................. 1280 pixels		 768 lines
		Front Porch.............   8 pixels		   1 lines
		Sync Width..............  112 pixels		   3 lines
		Back Porch..............  208 pixels		  30 lines
		Blanking................  408 pixels		  34 lines
		Total................... 1688 pixels		 802 lines
		Scan Rate...............  47.986 kHz		 59.833 Hz

		Image Size..............    0 mm		   0 mm
		Border..................    0 pixels		   0 lines

My previous Front Porch (right side of screen) was 48 pixels and previous Back Porch (left side of screen) was 248. I subtracted 40 from each to get the extra 80 pixels needed, making sure that the Total horizontal pixels stayed at 1688 pixels total. [Note: you normally cannot get the full 1366 pixels on the display because you must use a display size that is evenly divisible by 8 (1366/8=170.75). I've read before that you can scale up and then reduce pixel counts so you fill every pixel on the screen but that kind of tweaking is for people who really know what they're doing with this video stuff, not for ordinary users. I make note of this because of the huge numbers of 1366x768 LCD units on the market in recent years.]

I saved this as a new monitor setting, rebooted, brought up the Displays item in System Preferences and it worked perfectly (my set had already been set for 1366x768 and was displaying my former 1280x768 resolution with a black border of 43 pixels on left and right). After installing my new 1360x768 resolution, I had a barely visible border of 3 pixels on left and right, almost invisible from more than a foot away.

I thought after so many bad reviews based on misinformation around the net, mostly involving the optional use of APE in this product, more people needed to understand the issues involved. There is a lot of uninformed gossip about APE around, some of it well-founded. In the case of SwitchRes, this gossip is unfounded for most users who won't even inspect it closely enough to understand that APE is only required for a small number of advanced features in the program that are needed by only a few users.

I recommend others consider using this on their secondary displays on a Mac Pro (as I do) or for secondary displays connected to a Mac laptop. If you connect directly and bork your main display, you may have some problems getting back to a usable display with it. I have used this previously with my old PPC Mac Mini on the same Sharp LCD but it was a lot more painful before I got it to work. Hence, my advice that this is far safer for persons of medium tech skills to use on their secondary displays. If using it on a single-display setup, try to configure the monitor as a secondary display first and keep the primary display unaltered in case you need to recover. Make sure you know where the button to reset to standard default resolutions is located.

Enabling all the custom monitor controls and resolution selections in the More items of the Desktop's popup menu is a feature you might want to disable. For most people, you just need to enable the proper resolution and then select it from Displays in System Preferences as usual.

If you don't have any grasp of how to roll your own custom display resolutions, consider recruiting someone more knowledgeable or searching for info on the web about what settings to try with your particular model of display.

Register in this forum and read this link:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=9000286&&#post9000286

MG

I could not get my new 19" LCD display to work with my Powerbook G4 and with this software I was able to make a custom screen resolution and presto it is working great! If you are in my shoes this will save the day and the price was great! Way better than buying a $99 apple product to do the same thing!

As I have stated previously to Stephane, SwitchRes X Universal Binary (UB) had not played nicely with what was, at the time, the latest Application Enhancer from Unsanity (v1.5.1). This is because SwitchRes X depends on AE to permit blocking of screen resolution changes (i.e., iTunes visualizer, et al...), but this feature of SwitchRes X was unavailable with the non-UB AE.

Now, Unsanity has finally released AE in Universal Binary. So, the operative question for Stephane is... Will AE 2.0 now function with SwitchRes X 3.7.3? And are there any special procedures to get it installed and/or upgraded to be friendly with SwitchRes X? My guess is we'll need a new release from you, but could you confirm this pls... Thx.

I had been looking for a dual monitor solution for my mac mini. As everyone knows by now you just can't do it. Or can you?. I found an article on the DualHead2go from Matrox that claimed someone got it to work for the mini but the company says it is only support by pc. Well I just got the same set up working on my mac mini but only with the help of SwitchResX and the Author Stephane who replied to my emails quickly providing insight to what was happening and helped me to correct it. Thank you Stephane. I agree with one of the other comments here you need to know a little about your monitors and about resolution timing before you go setting your system to use timing it can't handle. Furthermore there is no need to bash a product you don't know how to use. My monitors could not handle above 76hz and the DualHead2go (not switchresx) was putting out 85hz on reboot. However because switchresx works so well I was able to vnc to my mini from another computer and select the new resolution that I had saved before rebooting. Now the system boots to the correct resolution every time unlike a another similar product I had read about where they had to create an apple script to reset the the resolution on boot.