Over the past month, I’ve noticed that a few of my favorite programs on the local PBS station seem too wide for my standard 4:3 TV.
I only really notice it when titles pop up during History Detectives or American Experience documentaries. The words are cut off. The rest of the picture may also be getting cut off, but it’s not as noticeable.
My signal comes through digital cable from Comcast. Does this have anything to do with the digital switch?
Same thing here for PBS in Madison WI.
It looks like the signal for some programs is “hard coded” to a 16:9 aspect ratio only.
Smacks of elitism a bit, no?
Or maybe they’re getting kickbacks from TV set manufacturers? 
E-mailed the station and got this answer:
If the show is broadcast in 16:9, you should be seeing it letterboxed (black bars at top and bottom) with nothing being cropped on your 4:3 screen. You should check the settings in your cable box to make sure it is configured for a 4:3 TV and that there aren’t any “zoom” settings enabled in the cable box or TV.
No matter what format the broadcast is in, your TV should be capable of displaying the full image and not crop into it at all. If there are no settings on your end that are doing this, then the cable company is sending out a seriously messed-up signal.
Edit: now that I see the answer in your post above, I amazed these guys can’t get it right. They charge enough that you would expect that someone would care to put out a quality product.
Since most TVs sold today are 16:9 aspect ratio, it makes sense for the programming to adopt this format. We’re in a transition time, where the mix of formats creates problems for widescreen viewers as well. Add to this DVD and BluRay movies that are displayed in an even wider format and we may never see a time where the content fills our screens perfectly without stretching, cropping or letterboxing.
Wow, brix11, that’s pretty impressive that they’d respond to you at all, but to admit in the first email that the problem is on their end is refreshing.
Comcast isn’t offered in my area, but being in the industry, I’ve always heard horror stories about them. This type of customer service makes me think a bit differently about them now.
brix, did you get that response from the PBS station, or from the cable provider? I was assuming the PBS station.
I noticed this problem with my PBS station as well when I went from analog broadcast to limited basic cable a few months ago.
That reply was from the PBS station. I wouldn’t have even dreamed of bothering to e-mail Comcast.
Ah, gotcha. Guess they won’t be making snowballs in hell any time soon afterall.
Comcast does this on some of our local feeds, but not others.
For instance, if I watch Conan O’Brien on Comcast’s SD NBC channel, the sides are chopped off, rather than having the image letterboxed. If I watch it on the TV in the kitchen with an antenna and digital converter box, I can set the box to either zoom and cut off the sides, or show the whole thing and letterbox it. Zoomed looks just like Comcast’s feed.
Oddly, shows on the Fox SD channel usually are letterboxed. ABC is like NBC, cut off, and now you often only see “AB” in the bug in the corner…:rolleyes: CW and CBS were letterboxed in SD last fall, but sometime this spring they went back to being cut off.:mad: I can’t speak for what they do with our PBS, as I rarely watch PBS.
Someone needs to let Comcast in on the fact that plenty of people with SD sets still don’t like having a chunk of the image cut off. Especially now that the shows are actually being shot with 16:9 in mind.
While I agree with you, I strongly suspect that if Comcast started letterboxing the 16:9 content, they would be inundated by complaints from customers that their screens have big black bars, and the picture is too small.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised that they actually did customer research and found out that most of their SD customers prefer “pan and scan” to letterboxing.
And by the way, with my local PBS affiliate, they often broadcast 16:9 content cropped to 4:3 on their digital broadcasts. So it might not even be within the cable providers control.
It’s probably not the broadcast that is 16:9 as much as the original photography. Clipping is the usual practice because people do complain about seeing a strip picture and usually there isn’t a lot going on at the edges to be missed.
I, for example, am one of the ones who would rather have a cropped picture filling the whole screen than a letterboxed picture. 4:3 TVs are often smaller than 16:9, so making the picture even smaller is not desirable for me.
Also, there is a third option, used a lot around here for the opposite problem: stretch the image to fit. Most broadcasts around here are at 480p, despite most people having HD sets capable of 1080p. And even if the broadcast is 1080p, people still use the A/V cables to connect things, and those are limited to 480p.
The funniest thing is seeing movies stretched AND letterboxed. It’s better than old widescreen Youtube videos (which are boxed on top and bottom).
I have several viewing setups from my computer(4:3 & 16:10 WS) to my cablebox/4:3 TV/Projector (4:3 or 16:9). Everything was just fine when Comcast was still providing basic analog 83 channel. They forced us to buy the “new” digital basic boxes or loose all the channels above 33. The picture is now noticeably of poorer quality with what I can only describe as “non interlace” lines. Text, especially small print, is the major indicator of this phenomena. Furthermore the images suffer from “blocking” issues. These artifacts are visible even on my 23" cathode 4:3 TV which used to be able to naturally blend them out. And now regardless of which system I am watching on the previously letter boxed shows are zoomed, removing a significant portion of the broadcast. The networks I notice it most on are Fox, ABC, Adult Swim (CTN) and a couple of others. Network watermarks, subtitles, even Comcasts own commercials are cut off. I am not at all happy with this & it stinks of wringing the most money possible out of us in the name of progress. The reports of broadcast HDTV being letter boxed confirm my suspicions that the issues are not due to the broadcast networks source material. Unfortunately I don’t yet have a DTV antenna to test the theory with myself. We plan to harass Comcast about it this week. This is getting ridiculous though. There’s got to be a way to fight it.
You know, I didn’t notice before that you guys are saying “pan and scan.” I always thought the whole point of that was that you moved the camera to where the action is. So if there was anything going on in the corners that was necessary to be shown, the camera would pan over to it.
That seems to the problem. Converting a movie to pan and scan takes some artistic interpretation to know to move the camera back and forth. This cannot happen with these automatic crops.
PBS really needs a smack upside the head with a brick or something.
The worst I’ve seen was (IIRC) an episode of Antiques Roadshow. The appearance was that someone took a 16:9 program, hard-matted it to 4:3 for a standard-def broadcast and recorded it. Then, this 4:3 tape was broadcast in letterbox 16:9. At least that’s what I’m guessing someone did. What came across to my TV was a window-boxed (black on sides and top/bottom) postage stamp of an image that was missing most of the captions and PBS logo.
I’ve noticed similar screwups on different PBS stations, so it does appear to be things are being mangled at a national level.
In the defense of PBS, they were the first station around here to broadcast in HD. So at least in HD they’re doing a good job. Shows like Nature are quite pretty in HD.
You said a key thing there: Broadcating in HD. BROADCASTING! Cable was originally designed when a bunch of farmers pooled their money together to put an antenna on the highest hill around so they could receive broadcast signals they otherwise wouldn’t be able to get from their household antennas. They then hooked up a “Cable” to the main antenna and ran the cables to their houses. Point being that cable is supposed to bring the full broadcast signal to you. Period. After spending all that money on the DTV transmitting setup & producing content in widescreen, does it make sense that they would then go through the extra trouble to down-convert back to a standard they just moved away from? And compromise their production value? Especially since before DTV they were already showing us most of their shows in 16:9? Not cost effective. I beleive the fault lies completely in the hands of the cable providers. Every one of them is pushing their newer, “better” cable format approximately every 3 months. How do you convince the public to buy a new format? Convince them that the current one will be obsolete in a couple of months. If that doesn’t work, subtly make the old one obsolete.
Followup to my previous post: I did actually manage to connect my ATI AIW to the broadcast antenna. Very few things surprise me these days. However, strangely enough, this is the first time I have actually seen the DTV signal with my own eyes. It knocked what I’m getting from my Comcast box out of the park, went out and found it, picked it up & then proceded to beat the crap out of it. Apparently the ONLY reason I’m paying for cable is to get access to the 7 or so other networks I like that I can’t get on DTV broadcast. Screw this, I’m getting a dish. At least that way I can pay low money for low quality.
So, when my roomate called them they said that this issue has a setting in the cable box. Apparently not mine as I’ve looked through ALL the menus. Twice. and twice again. More research to be done.
Sorry to defend cable or dish but the problem must lie with PBS. I killed my direct tv two years ago and get GREAT FREE HD. It comes over the airwaves and the cable companies (etc.) are downgrading the signal then bringing it back if you pay!
Anyway since I don’t have any pay service and recieve directly from antenna , it can’t be the cable company this time .
But it’s really irritating - since now it’s July of 2014!
The problem is that virtually all broadcasts originate as 16:9 HD now, and there’s only two practical ways of accommodating the 4:3 aspect ration of SD without manual pan&scan – the “correct” way is to letterbox, the other way is to clip the left and right of the image. It seems that some stations figure clipping is best, though most seem to have gone with letterboxing. They probably don’t worry about it too much since there are relatively few 4:3 sets still out there. The advantage of letterboxing is that it doesn’t lose image information and also that if you’re watching such an SD feed on an HD TV for whatever reason, you can always zoom the postage-stamped SD image and get full widescreen. But the advantage of clipping is that 4:3 TVs typically don’t have zoom functions, so a viewer who’d rather have a clipped full-screen image than letterboxing can’t do anything about it.