Aspect ratio

"Bill R" wrote in message
...
"widgitt" wrote in message
...
Can you let us know what TV it is and, if you have a seperate Sky
box / Freeview box / Freesat box / PVR, what it is?
I would not suggest cutting the pin 8 wire in the scart to stop this
as you would lose auto source switching as well, and almost always you
can configure the set up to work correctly with auto aspect switching
doing what it should.

Thanks.
The Television is a JVC model AV28WT5EK fed from an analogue General
Instrument CATV Converter box. The feed comes from Virgin Media via a
co-axial cable not a SCART although the TV and video recorder are
connected by SCART.

So a 28" Widescreen CRT with analogue cable tv...

Unless I'm mistaken you don't get proper 16:9 widescreen pictures from
analogue cable - you'll get either 4:3 pictures or a 14:9 image in a
letterbox , neither of which will fill the screen on your TV correctly.
You'll either have black bars or the image stretched and going off the edge
of your screen. If you are losing bits of the subtitles the latter is what
you are probably doing.

You can reduce the amount of zoom so you won't lose bits of the picture at
the expense of getting black bars , or you can get a different source -
digital cable , freeview or some form of satellite.


--
Alex

In article , Brian Gaff
writes
This may seem a silly suggestion but if all programming s soon to be wide
screen, why dont they send older 4/3 as wide screen and just fill out the
dark areas with low key colour, or in the case of Ch 5 a health warning.
Mind you it would make a great advertising opportunity.

Cos it would make the already poor DVB broadcasts even worse. At the
moment, 4:3 aspect programming is normally broadcast with the same 720?
(704) pixels per line resolution as widescreen. If it was sent as
widescreen with a 4:3 insert then only 540 image pixels per line.

If the border was kept black then that format should encode more
efficiently, so initially the difference might be imperceptible with the
same bitrate. However it wouldn't be long, perhaps immediately, till
they dropped the bitrate even further to get the same image quality as
they do on 3/4 of the current broadcast images.
--
Kennedy
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's ****ed.
Python Philosophers (replace 'nospam' with 'kennedym' when replying)

In article , Mike Henry
writes

This is exactly what the BBC do do, on Freeview. They use AFDs to tell the
STB what the picture is, and it can chop off the sides and send out a 4:3
image for a 4:3 TV if required. This means that on Freeview BBC 4:3
programmes only the central 540 pixels contain information and you end up
with a low-res 540x576 picture.

I'm not sure that is what they normally do. Most of the recordings I
have of 4:3 BBC programming straight from the Freeview video mux stream
have 704 image pixels per line, just like the widescreen programming. I
have a couple that have been coded as you suggest, but they fit a
cock-up rather than a conspiracy theory.
--
Kennedy
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's ****ed.
Python Philosophers (replace 'nospam' with 'kennedym' when replying)

"Mike Henry" wrote in message
...
In , "Brian Gaff"
wrote:

This may seem a silly suggestion but if all programming s soon to be wide
screen, why dont they send older 4/3 as wide screen and just fill out the
dark areas with low key colour, or in the case of Ch 5 a health warning.

This is exactly what the BBC do do, on Freeview. They use AFDs to tell the
STB what the picture is, and it can chop off the sides and send out a 4:3
image for a 4:3 TV if required. This means that on Freeview BBC 4:3
programmes only the central 540 pixels contain information and you end up
with a low-res 540x576 picture.

(I have the same issue when cinemascope movies are shrunk to fit into a 16:9
(or even 4:3) frame; only about 75% of the 576/720/1080 lines are used. But
everyone seems to think this is perfectly acceptable, even when I point out
that anamorphic 2.x:1 would have been better.)

This means that on Freeview BBC 4:3
programmes only the central 540 pixels contain information and you end up
with a low-res 540x576 picture.

Not sure about this however. I understood that both 16:9 and 4:3 material
use all the 576x720 pixels, and the signal tells it whether this is a
widescreen picture or not. But I guess you mean when a 16:9 picture is sent
to a 4:3 TV, in that case the sides will be chopped off unless a letterbox
option is present in the STB (both options losing picture detail though).

--
Bartc

Kennedy McEwen wrote:
In article , Mike Henry
writes

This is exactly what the BBC do do, on Freeview. They use AFDs to tell
the
STB what the picture is, and it can chop off the sides and send out a 4:3
image for a 4:3 TV if required. This means that on Freeview BBC 4:3
programmes only the central 540 pixels contain information and you end up
with a low-res 540x576 picture.

I'm not sure that is what they normally do. Most of the recordings I
have of 4:3 BBC programming straight from the Freeview video mux stream
have 704 image pixels per line, just like the widescreen programming. I
have a couple that have been coded as you suggest, but they fit a
cock-up rather than a conspiracy theory.

No, what Mike outlines is exactly how the BBC have transmitted 4:3 material
via DTT since year 2000. BBC DTT transmissions are also at 720 x 576, not the
more usual 704 x 576 used by other broadcasters, so are you sure you were
looking at BBC transmissions ?

It's different on D-Sat because Sky boxes do not, or certainly did not,
support AFDs. There the 4:3 programme is fed through an ARC and the
transmitted frame is indeed 720 x 576. However there's no improvement in
resolution because up until the ARC, the 4:3 material is still pillarboxed
within the Beeb's own internal distribution. The same applies to just about
every other broadcaster that has 'mixed AR' transmission.


--
Mark
Please replace invalid and invalid with gmx and net to reply.

www.paras.org.uk

"Graham Murray" wrote in message
...
"Brian Gaff" writes:

This may seem a silly suggestion but if all programming s soon to be wide
screen, why dont they send older 4/3 as wide screen and just fill out
the
dark areas with low key colour, or in the case of Ch 5 a health warning.
Mind you it would make a great advertising opportunity.

Maybe because it would not display at all well on an (older) 4/3 TV
set. While all the programming may be going widescreen, many people
still use 4/3 TV sets.

I think most STBs should expand the 4:3 image to fill the screen OK if they
are set for a 4:3 TV. Still annoying to deal with the changing widescreen
aspect ratios on a 4:3 set - from standard 16:9 to 21:9 ultra letter box.

--
Max Demian

In article , Mark Carver
writes
Kennedy McEwen wrote:
In article , Mike Henry
writes

This is exactly what the BBC do do, on Freeview. They use AFDs to
tell the
STB what the picture is, and it can chop off the sides and send out a 4:3
image for a 4:3 TV if required. This means that on Freeview BBC 4:3
programmes only the central 540 pixels contain information and you end up
with a low-res 540x576 picture.

I'm not sure that is what they normally do. Most of the recordings I
have of 4:3 BBC programming straight from the Freeview video mux
stream have 704 image pixels per line, just like the widescreen
programming. I have a couple that have been coded as you suggest,
but they fit a cock-up rather than a conspiracy theory.

No, what Mike outlines is exactly how the BBC have transmitted 4:3
material via DTT since year 2000. BBC DTT transmissions are also at 720
x 576, not the more usual 704 x 576 used by other broadcasters, so are
you sure you were looking at BBC transmissions ?

Absolutely certain - and just checked a couple to be sure. To clarify
things, widescreen BBC programming is indeed at 720 pixels per line, but
the 4:3 programming is at 704 pixels, certainly not the 540 pixels that
would result from fitting a 4:3 image in a 720 pixel wide 16:9 frame
with black sidebars.
eg. BBC4 Mon 28/12/[email protected]:00 "For all Mankind" 4:3 aspect 704x576pix
--
Kennedy
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker, but a bugger when he's ****ed.
Python Philosophers (replace 'nospam' with 'kennedym' when replying)

The Television is a JVC model AV28WT5EK fed from an analogue General
Instrument CATV Converter box. *The feed comes from Virgin Media via a
co-axial cable not a SCART although the TV and video recorder are connected
by SCART.

Didnt know that you could still have an analogue CATV box. Can you not
upgrage it to digital or is that not an option where you are ?
Most JVC's will auto aspect switch quite well, set up correctly and
with a suitable feed from a digital box of one sort or another.

"widgitt" wrote in message
...

The Television is a JVC model AV28WT5EK fed from an analogue General
Instrument CATV Converter box. The feed comes from Virgin Media via a
co-axial cable not a SCART although the TV and video recorder are
connected
by SCART.

Didnt know that you could still have an analogue CATV box. Can you not
upgrage it to digital or is that not an option where you are ?
Most JVC's will auto aspect switch quite well, set up correctly and
with a suitable feed from a digital box of one sort or another.

Virgin Medfia is switching off the analogue signal in my area mid February
so I am being forced to change to digital.

Bill R

Kennedy McEwen wrote:

No, what Mike outlines is exactly how the BBC have transmitted 4:3
material via DTT since year 2000. BBC DTT transmissions are also at
720 x 576, not the more usual 704 x 576 used by other broadcasters, so
are you sure you were looking at BBC transmissions ?

Absolutely certain - and just checked a couple to be sure. To clarify
things, widescreen BBC programming is indeed at 720 pixels per line, but
the 4:3 programming is at 704 pixels, certainly not the 540 pixels that
would result from fitting a 4:3 image in a 720 pixel wide 16:9 frame
with black sidebars.
eg. BBC4 Mon 28/12/[email protected]:00 "For all Mankind" 4:3 aspect 704x576pix

Interesting. What kit are you using ? I wonder if the AFD command that flags
the broadcast, is causing your device to rescale to 704 ?

--
Mark
Please replace invalid and invalid with gmx and net to reply.

www.paras.org.uk