I've got a new Pioneer 5020 with an older HD DirectTivo (HR10-250) connected to it via HDMI. With the screen set to dot by dot mode, a PS3 an XBox360 and my Denon 2910 DVD player all appear fine in 1080i/p mode. But my DirectTivo's alignment is off, showing a white dashed line at the top and a green line on the side.

Everything is connected via a Denon receiver with an HDMI switch.

I can get around this by setting the DirectTivo to 720p mode which causes the Pioneer to fall back to auto screen adjust mode. That's mostly okay except that text tends to get "wobbly" (like on screen credits) as if the scaler is having issues. (I can't adjust the screen position from the Tivo side or from the screen menus)

My main question is if this is a Pioneer screen problem or just a "this stuff happens" with older components?

I've got a new Pioneer 5020 with an older HD DirectTivo (HR10-250) connected to it via HDMI. With the screen set to dot by dot mode, a PS3 an XBox360 and my Denon 2910 DVD player all appear fine in 1080i/p mode. But my DirectTivo's alignment is off, showing a white dashed line at the top and a green line on the side.

Everything is connected via a Denon receiver with an HDMI switch.

I can get around this by setting the DirectTivo to 720p mode which causes the Pioneer to fall back to auto screen adjust mode. That's mostly okay except that text tends to get "wobbly" (like on screen credits) as if the scaler is having issues. (I can't adjust the screen position from the Tivo side or from the screen menus)

My main question is if this is a Pioneer screen problem or just a "this stuff happens" with older components?

That's normal, that happens with all TV's that have a dot-by-dot/just scan picture size mode. It's not a problem with the TV, the issue is that when you set a TV to those modes, it has zero overscan, so some sources that are displayed aren't in true 1920x1080, but more like 1919x1079, so that results in the green lines of pixels on the edges of the picture.

So what you can do is either set the TV to 16x9 mode, or move the screen to cover that part if you can adjust it on TV