Brad Ideas - How to stop people from putting widescreen TVs in stretch mode - Comments

I got a new tv last christmas

TV fix — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:12:31 -0700

I got a new tv last christmas, and and wait to see all the channels I wanted to watch. But when I turned it on, there was something off, the whole thing was streched and the sides are cropped off(the shows are 16:9 but thinks my screen is 4:3) and the only person that can help is my dad. He did not know about the problem and 6 months went by until I showed him the sports channels and he notices that he hates it because its wierd(In other words, "Streched") and fixes it. You know what, show some people their favourite channel, the ones that they watch all day, that are either 4:3 or think your tv is 4:3 and they will not love it.

Yes, especially with

Jon — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 20:07:17 -0700

Yes, especially with animated shows. Apparently it's okay to stretch out cartoons. Nope, sorry, even animated people look like football heads when stretched out.

At the moment I'm stuck with a hotel TV that not only stretches out the 4:3 signal, but it's zoomed in past 16:9 so it's painful to watch.

It would be nice if we could

Anonymous — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 20:32:29 -0700

It would be nice if we could just arrest and lock up people who have their TVs displayed incorrectly. It would definitely cut down on the amount of stupid people in the world. Pretty much everyone who pays for cable should be locked up too.

Rubik's Cube

Nathan — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 17:37:00 -0700

I thought for such a long time that this was just a South African problem. I'm actually kinda horrified to learn that that's not the case. I used to say that giving a widescreen tv set to a South African is like giving a Rubik's cube to a slightly dim two-year-old. The pretty colours are great but they'll never quite get what it's for.

To the earlier commenter who feels cheated - that's what you get for going out and buying something you don't understand. Yes, you could've gone to a pawn shop and got a giant Cathode Ray Tube from the seventies, set your set-top box to crop wide content (most still seem to do that by default anyway) and all your stories would be nice and big and fill up the entire screen. And the really sad part is you'd be happy.

I think people should have to pass a license exam in order to be allowed to purchase widescreen sets.

Yes, this topic brings out the angry sarcastic misanthrope in me.

This wave effect you're

Anonymous — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 12:04:52 -0700

This wave effect you're seeing: my PC's player (PowerDVD DX) calls it "CLPV", and the other option is "letterbox", in the settings where it asks what to do with a 4:3 frame on my widescreen monitor.

It is noticeable any time a camera pans or zooms (mostly panning), and I leave it off.

Different version of Stretched - slightly more palatable

N1JDU — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 11:46:41 -0700

I also hate watching a 4 x 3 image stretched out to fill a 16 x 9 screen. Recently I have noticed that some TV's have a (slightly) better option. The "stretching" is done mainly at the edges of the screen. The center of the image is "normal" and the distortion gradually occurs as you move left or right.

I still don't like it, but it is certainly more tollerable to watch.

What also bugs me is that I recently upgraded my cable box to HD, and now I find that some channels that broadcast a SD show will stretch it out on the HD version of the channel :-((

Wow

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 11:37:23 -0700

So I'm not losing my mind? My roommates insist on watching stretched TV. It drove me so insane that we compromised on my mentioning it, to make a little joke out of it. Each calendar week I am allowed one opportunity to comment on how fat/squished/effed up everything looks, and I make sure to really savor it. Of course when I'm watching something 4:3, I suffer the *incredible torment* of the diabolical pillarbars. Note to the dim: that's sarcasm. And your stretched picture is leotarded!

Yea I absolutely do feel

Anonymous — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 10:06:12 -0800

Yea I absolutely do feel cheated by those cursed black bars. I paid good money for a big TV and it is frustrating to see that the whole screen is not in use. It makes me feel as if I could have bought a smaller TV and gotten the same size screen. In fact, the old TV we just replaced with a sony Bravia DOES have the same size screen when I put the aspect ratio on "normal", feels like a ripoff to be honest.

I hate WS TV's that are

Midna — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 10:07:56 -0800

I hate WS TV's that are stretched. I hate FS and hate the fact that many channels still broadcast like this but I live with it. Having a stretched image I can not live with or ever get used to. It looks fuzzy and people like stretched and distorted and I hate it. My Mom and Dad and sister both prefer it and don't see a difference. I always laugh at them because of it. I'm very observant and I noticed it the first time I saw it.

What about the black bars when watching WS in a SDTV/CRT TV? Too bad there wasn't an option for to stretched the image vertically, I would love to see it, LOOOOOL.

I keep changing setting to normal and they keep changing the setting back to panorama.Worst thing about TV's like that, is having an option to change the resolution to fake WS. Why can't people just except it and watch it in the format it's supposed to be in?

~Midna

Good To Know I'm Not Alone!

Stew — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 04:50:51 -0800

Thank goodness there are others that cannot stand the proliferation of "stretched" TV screens besides me! I'm in a hotel room as I type this that has a nice, new, large LG flat screen monitor. When I first turned it on, sure enough, stretched screen. I more or less expected it because it's so common these days. Luckily, I was able to use the sets' menu buttons on its side to access the setup and change it from "16:9" to "Set by Program". Then I discovered that when you turn the set off, it reverts back to 16:9, requiring me to do the setup gymnastics every time I turn it on. I guess I should be happy that at least I can change it.

My wife and I went out to dinner last night that had flat screen TVs all over the restaurant. Of cousre, every one of 'em had a stretched screen! Help! Let me outta here!

Clearly what's going on here is precisely what's already been identified in this blog: Many people don't even "see" the stretched nature of the picture. Their mind just doesn't get it. And they feel "cheated" if all of the screen's real estate isn't getting used. There are even people that do see it and still prefer the use of all of the screen than the pillarboxed picture, even though the former is distorted and the latter is not. I was trying to explain this to a guy in a sports bar once and he just didn't get it until, during the football game that was on, one of the cameras grabbed a shot of the full moon and it was oval shaped! "Okay, now I see what you're talking about!"

It's the fault of DVDs

brad — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:54:08 -0800

DVDs are made either in widescreen anamorphic or in 4:3 mode. But the TV does not know what sort of DVD is playing, and the DVD player does not know what sort of TV you have unless you go into the menus and tell it.

So to fix that, and the fact that older dvd players did not have a way to be told what sort of tv you had, the tvs needed an aspect ratio switcher, since for an anamorphic widescreen dvd (the best sort of dvd) the stretch is the right thing to do. However, that is the only time it is the right thing.

The other mode that is handy is zoom mode, for use when watching letterbox movies on TV or DVD. In that case you want to zoom (perhaps) to make them fill the screen. The TV could detect that on its own but they often don’t.

Today, when every dvd player can be told what sort of tv you have (and could make that easy to do in the setup) there is no need for an aspect ratio button.

I have a WS TV in my living

Me — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:43:03 -0800

I have a WS TV in my living room and everyone in this house prefers the image to be stretched but me. I hardly ever watch TV, but still, every time I look at the TV and see it stretched it just bothers me. If only TV's were always WS to begin with and everything was WS.

Or, if only they didn't make the "aspect" button on the TV remotes so it shows everything in their right aspect.

When it's FS (set to 16x9 ratio) people look stretched out and on both sides of the picture (when the camera or something is moving) you can see like a wave in the picture (kinda like what looks like water on a dry road on a hot day). No one else notices this but me.

Drives me nuts

Tim — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 09:49:04 -0700

I really hate it when people get the aspect ratio wrong (either way). And other posters are right - they can't even see it after you point it out!!! Why can they not see that everyone is the wrong shape!!! That things (including people) change shape as they rotate on screen? Do they not know what people actually look like? Is there not a club for people like us!!!

I think I need to calm down...

Not getting widescreen

Muzz — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 12:01:03 -0700

Something is very odd. Please can anyone help?
I hav just followed in the footsteps of my friend next door by buying a 32" LCD Samsung.
On my tv, it seems that (apart from the occasional American prog) Channel 4 is all widescreen. In a 4:3 ratio, it is a small rectangular picture so that, on "Auto Wide", it fills the screen with normal proportions. Great.
But all the other channels are only ok in a 4:3 ratio ~ I refuse to watch them stretched & so, yeah, sometimes I put it on "Wide Zoom" so I miss the top & bottom, if I feel like watching the full screen.
BUT !! And here's the thing .... my neighbour receives most channels (apart from US ones) in a widescreen format ~ BBC1 &2, ITV ~ the lot ! A programme on his tv in a 4:3 ratio is squashed thin so that on widescreen the proportions are right ~ makes sense. But on my tv the same programme in 4:3 is NOT squashed.
Is it because he is Freeview & I am Virgin cable? Why would my channel4 be ok then?

We need a master remote

brad — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 23:27:34 -0700

Perhaps they already do it, but it would be cool to have one of those remote control programs for phones and PDAs (or laptops) which have an infrared LED on them, and have the program include the codes to control hotel TVs and in particular to fix their aspect ratio.

How to stop people from putting widescreen TVs in stretch mode

brad — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 19:19:44 -0800

(Note I have a simpler article for those just looking for advice on how to get their Widescreen TV to display properly.)

Very commonly today I see widescreen TVs being installed, both HDTV and normal. Flat panel TVs are a big win in public places since they don’t have the bulk and weight of the older ones, so this is no surprise, even in SDTV. And they are usually made widescreen, which is great.

Yet almost all the time, I see them configured so they take standard def TV programs, which are made for a 4:3 aspect ratio, and stretch them to fill the 16:9 screen. As a result everybody looks a bit fat. The last few hotel rooms I have stayed in have had widescreen TVs configured like this. Hotel TVs disable you from getting at the setup mode, offering a remote control which includes the special hotel menus and pay-per-view movie rentals. So you can’t change it. I’ve called down to the desk to get somebody to fix the TV and they often don’t know what I’m talking about, or if somebody comes it takes quite a while to get somebody who understands it.

This is probably because I routinely meet people who claim they want to set their TV this way. They just “don’t like” having the blank bars on either side of the 4:3 picture that you get on a widescreen TV. They say they would rather see a distorted picture than see those bars. Perhaps they feel cheated that they aren’t getting to use all of their screen. (Do they feel cheated with a letterbox movie on a 4:3 TV?)

It is presumably for those people that the TVs are set this way. For broadcast signals, a TV should be able to figure out the aspect ratio. NTSC broadcasts are all in 4:3, though some are letterboxed inside the 4:3 which may call for doing a “zoom” to expand the inner box to fill the screen, but never a “stretch” which makes everybody fat. HDTV broadcasts are all natively in widescreen, and just about all TVs will detect that and handle it. (All U.S. stations that are HD always broadcast in the same resolution, and “upconvert” their standard 4:3 programs to the HD resolution, placing black “pillarbox” bars on the left and right. Sometimes you will see a program made for SDTV letterbox on such a channel, and in that case a zoom is called for.)

The only purpose the “stretch” function has is for special video sources like DVD players. Today, almost all widescreen DVDs use the superior “anamorphic” widescreen method, where the full DVD frame is used, as it is for 4:3 or “full frame” DVDs. Because TVs have no way to tell DVD players what shape they are, and DVD players have no way to tell TVs whether the movie is widescreen or 4:3, you need to tell one or both of them about the arrangement. That’s a bit messy. If you tell a modern DVD player what shape TV you have, it will do OK because it knows what type of DVD it is. DVD players, presented with a widescreen movie and a 4:3 TV will letterbox the movie. However, if you have a DVD player that doesn’t know what type of TV it is connected to, and you play a DVD, you have to tell the TV to stretch or pillarbox. This is why the option to stretch is there in the first place.

However, now that it’s there, people are using it in really crazy ways. I would personally disable stretch mode when playing from a source known not to be a direct video input video player, but as I said people are actually asking for the image to be incorrectly stretched to avoid seeing the bars.

So what can we do to stop this, and to get the hotels and public TVs to be set right, aside from complaining? Would it make sense to create “cute” pillarbars perhaps with the image of an old CRT TV’s sides in them? Since HDTVs have tons of resolution, they could even draw the top and bottom at a slight cost of screen size, but not of resolution. Some TVs offer the option of gray, black and white pillars, but perhaps they can make pillars that somehow match the TV’s frame in a convincing way, and the frame could even be designed to blend with the pillars.

Would putting up fake drapes do the job? In the old days of the cinema, movies came in different widths sometimes, and the drapes would be drawn in to cover the left and right of the screen if the image was going to be 4:3 or something not as wide. They were presumably trying to deal with the psychological problem people have with pillarbars.

Or do we have to go so far as to offer physical drapes or slats which are pulled in by motors, or even manually? The whole point of flatscreen TVs is we don’t have a lot of room to do something like this, which is why it’s better if virtual. And of course it’s crazy to spend the money such things would cost, especially if motorized, to make people feel better about pillarbars.

I should also note that most TVs have a “zoom” mode, designed to take shows that end up both letterboxed and pillarbarred and zoom them to properly fit the screen. That’s a useful feature to have — but I also see it being used on 4:3 content to get rid of the pillarbars. In this case at least the image isn’t stretched, but it does crop off the top and bottom of the image. Some programs can tolerate this fine (most TV broadcasts expect significant overscan, meaning that the edges will be behind the frame of the TV) but of course on others it’s just as crazy as stretching. I welcome other ideas.

Update: Is it getting worse, rather than better? I recently flew on Virgin America airlines, which has widescreen displays on the back of each seat. They offer you movies (for $8) and live satellite TV. The TV is stretched! No setting box to change it, though if you go to their “TV chat room” you will see it in proper aspect, at 1/3 the size. I presume the movies are widescreen at least.