I’m looking at you, TBS. And you, TNT. And you, A&E. And to a lesser extent, History, Science, and a couple others… What the hell is WRONG with you? Don’t you have engineers or anything? Ones that can do fucking arithmetic?
This really ain’t rocket science. I don’t know math beyond high school calculus, but even I can comprehend the notion of aspect ratio. There are two things you do that piss me off.
One, when you stretch out 4:3 to 16:9, what happens is that everybody looks like Danny DeVito. Their heads are squashed like mushrooms. Squares are no longer square. Basketballs are egg-shaped.
And second, when you do this to a picture that has already been shot at 16:9 inside a 4:3 constraint and then fucking stretch it to fit an actual 16:9, the effect is multiplied. It makes you have to put black bars at the top and bottom because you stretched the original black bars with it, and no amount of fiddling with any of the ratio corrections will fix the fucking thing.
I was looking forward to the new Universe series, only to find that God-fucking-zilla had walked all over the solar system and crushed everything. The moon looked like a goddamn football. It’s hard to enjoy the show when the scientist you’re interviewing has a weirder head than Stewie Griffin.
Have a look at HDNet or INHD or even Mojo or Fox to see how the fuck this is done, and then hire someone smarter than Jethro Bodine to fix your damn shit. Criminey.
Amen brother! I just got HD TV in a Black Friday sale and sometimes I’m pissed I waited so long to get one and other times I’m pissed because my picture looks worse on my brand new TV vs my 10 year old Sony.
No it ain’t. Done properly it’s so pretty it makes me want to cry. Finally, “home cinema” isn’t a scandalous lie, and I no longer have to put up with mouthbreathing, muttering multiplex miscreants. Also, you just haven’t watched football until you can count all of Steve McLaren’s pores.
Anyway, take heart, Liberal, it could be worse; you might live with housemates who actively insist on watching 4:3 content in DeVitoVision[sup]TM[/sup] - so you’re not “wasting part of the TV”. It’s gotten so I habitually watch the TV from an angle so that foreshortening mostly corrects the aspect ratio.
Incidentally, my TV has a “widescreen zoom” option to take care of letterboxed stuff broadcast in 4:3; does this not work for problem 2?
Ugh. All the ways people misbroadcast HD. They’re all so fucking annoying. Maybe after we make the Official Switch at least the broadcaster’s will get it right.
But maybe not. My local PBS station often shows HD filmed programs (i.e., filmed 16:9) boxed down to low def and then broadcast that in high def. In other words, I’m watching the digital channel on my HDTV and have this little teeny tiny picture in the middle of the screen surrounded by this big black border on all four sides.
On my Sharp Aquos, it’s only an option on the Inputs 1 - 3. I have the cable DVR on the HDMI input, which does not allow for that option so even when I have the black bars on the top and bottom, I have to deal with it. Generally not a huge deal for me as it only happens on non-HD broadcasts anyway.
Are you using HDMI for a reason (such as multiple home theater inputs)?
I ask because I just got over a 1-month headache dealing with my dad’s new cable dvr-to-hdmi-to-tv set up where stuff was just NOT displaying properly. Here’s my thread on it.
Anyway, I asked two different, seemingly knowledgeable Time Warner support reps about possibly switching to component cables and they said it wouldn’t make a difference. So I stood in line at the local TW store for a half hour to get a new box, and the lady at the window said “you have to use component cables. HDMI won’t work.”
I took the box back to dad’s, hooked up the component cable, dicked around with the “Setup Wizard” a bit and now everything works like a charm. Widescreen is widescreen and standard is standard and zoom works just fine for non-widescreen letterbox.
I had TBS-HD on last night. The office looked ok, but it was obviously just stretched up from the letterboxed 4:3 version.
FrankTV came on. A big logo popped up “In HD Where Available” except clicking down one notch to the standard channel indicated Frank isn’t quite that fat- and they had stretched a 4:3 broadcast and called it “HD”
TBS (and TNT) does that with every fucking movie, too. They broadcast the reformatted version and then stretch it to widescreen. Why the fuck do they do this? Do they not own the originals? I thought TT bought the whole shebang some time ago.
Yeah, those piss me off. Between this and people stretching 4:3 images to fill up their widescreen TVs so they don’t “waste the screen,” aliens are going to think we strecth and compress with the tides or something.
On the other hand, some cable broadcasts are so shitty you can’t even make anything out. We got TBS HD in the middle of the MLB LDS, so for the first few games we were watching at supposed standard def, but it was so blocky that if someone hit a grounder to the outfield, you couldn’t actually see the baseball against the grass when the camera zoomed out to find the outfielder. It was a step above Youtube quality. Unacceptable.
All of these stories make me wonder if the broadcasters have a fucking clue what the hell HD actually is. It’s not that hard to figure out how to alter a 4:3 image for a 16:9 upscale without screwing up the aspect ratio. I mean, it’s an easy mistake to make if you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing, but aren’t they supposed to be professionals?
Kind of makes me glad we haven’t sprung for an HD set yet, as much as I would like one. I’m an eye-candy junkie
My girlfriend actually stretches the screen on purpose. That way everyone looks like they are 30 pounds heavier. It is good for her ego.
A warning though, if you just leave gray areas on the side of the screen it isn’t good for the TV. They don’t recommend it for more than 15% or so of viewing time depending on your set.
Except that there are some glorious HD networks that get it right — HDNet being the god of them all. The three commercial networks used to fudge with 720i, but now they’ve pretty well gone to 1180i, and their stuff looks great. Discover does it right too. And PBS usually does. UniHD, Mojo, Home and Garden, the Food Network — all those do great HD. Even CNN does genuine widescreen HD. It’s just these few knuckle-dragging fuck-ups that have just enough cool shows or movies to make it a bummer that they can’t do it right.