Overscan not hidden over HDMI?
 

With RCA, any TV I have seen outputs a 640x480ish image with at least faux-overscan hiding. Over HDMI, however, no overscan is hidden and everything is shown. Is this common to all HDMI 480i/p connections?

So the question is specifically about sending 480 over HDMI, not pre-upscaled?

It really depends on the TV and how its options are set. My Panasonic TC-55CX850U always crops the left and right edges when the input is 480p and the aspect ratio is set to 4:3. It has an Overscan On/Off function, but it does nothing in this mode. It also has an "H size" option: Size 1 is supposed to be full and Size 2 is supposed to trim the sides a bit. Instead, Size 1 trims a little and Size 2 trims more.

Thanks. I had never really played with resizing vs. masking, but I tried a fairly clean VHS crop/resize encode with high bitrate and it looked pretty terrible. Also reaffirms how terrible VHS can look if not handled properly.

Overscan is very TV-dependent, HDMI or not.

Officially, according to ISO/etc specs, overscan should always be hidden. But as we all know, not all manufacturers obey this, especially the budget TV makers.