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

Oh how I hate when people stretch it

Anonymous — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:18:56 -0700

I can't stand it, but you know what. Most people don't even notice that it is stretched. They don't know, and can't see it, and even if you tell them, they can't see it. This is weird, coz I notice imediately and can't watch it.

What is even worse is that tv-stations do it too. It usually happens when they are sending a program in 16:9, in which they show clips (like in the news) from programs in 4:3, and then stretch those 4:3 pictures to 16:9.

Sometimes they will even send a 16:9 program, letterboxed into 4:3, and then again letterboxed into 16:9, so you on a 4:3 tv will have black borders on all 4 sides.

They do

Anonymous — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 13:04:42 -0700

The DVD specification does allow this, but no manufacturer implements it.

My LG

Chuck — Thu, 22 Feb 2007 16:26:30 -0800

I have a 32" LG LCD wide screen that has an automatic detection mode which seems to do a fairly decent job, but then I have never been bothered by having part of my screen not in use. This is only the 3rd wide screen I have become very familiar with, the other two were Samsung. Those did not have any such feature.

Well strictly

brad — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 00:41:49 -0800

You are cheated with a letterbox movie on a 4:3 TV since almost all 4:3 TVs are low resolution, and as such letterbox movies lose a lot of detail. I understand the attraction of pan and scan. It is a trade-off between what is lost to the crop and what is lost to the poor resolution. It’s not always true that one is right. Some “full frame” DVDs are not pan and scan, however, they are the same as the letterbox with more stuff at the top and bottom — stuff that’s not vital to the shot, but not necessarily detrimental either.

What I always thought would have made sense would have been for the DVD format to support pan/crop done by the DVD player. When playing on a 4:3 TV in pan mode, the stream would include information on what vertical position to start the frame. This would not have been very hard for DVD players to introduce. The editor who makes the pan version would just record that stream, and the DVD player would have cropped out an appropriately moving 4:3 box from the widescreen image.

This would have allowed there to be just one DVD, instead of having to release both a widescreen and a pan/scan. It would also be easy with today’s player to allow zoom and crop, so that you could zoom in a bit if the user enabled it — since most 4:3 TVs don’t present the full 480 lines sharply you could do this a little bit.

Were DVD players not so locked down, this sort of functionality might well have been put into them, saving the producers, the video stores and the customer money and hassle. Not as much point now that we’re making the transition to HDTV on DVD, though it could still apply to the many movies that are made in wider than 16 by 9.

After home video became a big part of the movie market, movie directors started shooting for it, in particular filming for the open matte style where the normally invisible top and bottom of the shot are revealed, or composing important elements into a 4:3 frame.

I expect as HDTV becomes standardized directors will be told to definitely compose for that aspect ratio, even if they plan to project at 2.35:1 in the cinema. I expect however that more than 1.85:1 will become uncommon.

bq. Do they feel cheated

Todd Larason — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 22:31:54 -0800

[textile]
"Do they feel cheated with a letterbox movie on a 4:3 TV?"
Yes, yes they do. These are the people who buy pan & scan "full screen" DVDs instead of widescreen.

How to stop people from putting widescreen TVs in stretch mode

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

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.