compiz - Mar 2010 - Emulate a lower desktop resolution for web browsing/flash

Hi,

My TV isn't big enough to read text when browsing websites (we sit far
away) and flash performance is awful at 1920x1080.
So I'm looking into ways to decrease the desktop resolution.

But my TV (Samsung 46" F series) only supports 1920x1080 via the VGA
connector - any lower resolution and it jumps to 1280x1024 which is
4:3 and makes widescreen flash content play squashed.

I'm planning to emulate a lower resolution but keep the TV at
1920x1080. I'm hoping to write a compiz plugin which, without changing
X's resolution, renders windows to a configurable size screen and uses
the GPU to scale the result up. GPU scaling should the result looks
nice without taxing the CPU. End result: smooth fullscreen flash,
readable text from the couch, and no use of firefox's awful image
scaling for full-page zoom!

I can't see anything on google but I might be looking for the wrong
words - has this been tried before?

On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 1:31 PM, Chris Adams <rocket at extremelan.net>
wrote:
> Hi,
>
> My TV isn't big enough to read text when browsing websites (we sit far
> away) and flash performance is awful at 1920x1080.
> So I'm looking into ways to decrease the desktop resolution.
>
> But my TV (Samsung 46" F series) only supports 1920x1080 via the VGA
> connector - any lower resolution and it jumps to 1280x1024 which is
> 4:3 and makes widescreen flash content play squashed.
>
> I'm planning to emulate a lower resolution but keep the TV at
> 1920x1080. I'm hoping to write a compiz plugin which, without changing
> X's resolution, renders windows to a configurable size screen and uses
> the GPU to scale the result up. GPU scaling should the result looks
> nice without taxing the CPU. End result: smooth fullscreen flash,
> readable text from the couch, and no use of firefox's awful image
> scaling for full-page zoom!
>
Completely smooth scaling (resolution independence) is not possible in
compiz because we only get textures of windows at the size they are
rendered at. If it is a 300x300 window then the texture size is also
300x300. This means that upscaling that texture will result in quality
degradation. The only way to  work around this is to use filtering, of
which we have a fairly accurate bicubic filtering algorithm in -main
already but it is still limited by the fact that the more you upscale,
the less data we have to work with.

If you want resolution independence, you will need toolkit support.
Your toolkit needs to render pixmaps that have a high resolution
intended to be of a certain size on a certain resolution. These
pixmaps can be used in compiz to give high-quality scaled images.
(much like any other window manager).

I believe work is being done to put something like this in GTK+ [1]

Kind Regards,

Sam

[1] http://www.osnews.com/story/20161/Resolution_Independence_Coming_to_GTK_

> I can't see anything on google but I might be looking for the wrong
> words - has this been tried before?
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-- 
Sam Spilsbury