Aspect Ratio Madness!

[bdgbill]

Ok, I have been living with my new widescreen plasma for about 2 weeks. The biggest dispointment so far has been the constant fiddling with the aspect ratio button on the remote.

I thought all HD signals would fit the screen perfectly - Wrong!

I thought widescreen SD signals would fit the screen perfectly - Wrong!

I thought widescreen DVD's would fit my screen perfectly - Wrong!

Widescreen SD actually has black bars on the sides and the top and bottom. Using 16:9 zoom on these signals still leaves black bars on the top and bottom.

Some of my HD signals are 4:3 and need to be stretched to fit the screen. The stretched HD signals look fine except for text.

It would be nice if my $300.00 HD cable box would allow me to set a screen shape for each individual channel but no dice.

Wide screen DVD's fill a band in the middle of the screen leaving huge black bars at the top and bottom. The black bars on DVD's take up aprox half the screen.

This has all been a big challenge to the WAF.

I'm hoping this is all temporary and everyone will get together to produce content for the soon to be dominant 16:9 screen shape.

[5058]

What resolution are you running your GBPVR pc at?
I have a 37" LCD that I run GBPVR on at 1360x768 (tv native is 1366x7680) I have no HD inputs but my SD 4:3 shows I ru in pillar box mode and they look quite good , any SD widescreen I run in fill mode and that almost fills the entoire screen at the proper aspect ratio. As for your DVD's , they are running at 480i/p so yes you will have black bars at the top and bottom of you 720p/1081i screen unless you stretch them. I have recently bought an upconverting HDMI DVD player and are very happy with it now that I have a HDTV.
I'm not sure what cable box you have in Montreal , possibly a Scientific Atlanta 3250HD or possibly a PACE but make sure you go through the setup wizard and set all your possible resolutions (480i 720p 1080i etc) Then you can tell the box what resolution to run in and then it should fit the signals properly (at least a 3250 does.) Remember SD tv and Regular DVD's will not fill the screen unless you stretch it (content is 480 - screen is 1080)

[whurlston]

TVs are widescreen with a 16:9 ratio (sometimes written as 1.77) or a 16:10 (which is actually a computer monitor aspect ratio). DVDs and some movies that are broadcast are in the original aspect ration of the film which was designed for movie theaters. Standard cinema widescreen is 1.85 and CinemaScope Widescreen is 2.35, both of which are wider than the 16:9 ratio. This is the reason that there are black bars on the top and bottom. A 2.35 movie will have larger bars than a 1.85. The bars on a 2.35 source will cover roughly 25% of a 16:9 screen split between top and bottom.

Here is a good paper covering aspec ratios:
http://www.cinemasource.com/articles/aspect_ratios.pdf

[bdgbill]

What resolution are you running your GBPVR pc at?

I have recently bought an upconverting HDMI DVD player and are very happy with it now that I have a HDTV.

I'm not sure what cable box you have in Montreal , possibly a Scientific Atlanta 3250HD or possibly a PACE but make sure you go through the setup wizard and set all your possible resolutions (480i 720p 1080i etc)

As far as I can tell my nVidia settings only allow 800x600 or 1024x768. I'm running 1024x768. My TV has a weird resolution of 1280x1080 (I call it "Not quite 1080P")

My Cable box is a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 4250HD. I have not really gotten into the STB too much. Just enough to realize that I could not key the screen shape to the channel number. Why would they forget this?? :mad:

Which upconverting DVD player did you get?

[stustunz]

with the older nvidia drivers yiou can add whatever resolution you want under custom resolutions
with the newer drivers you still can but its harder to add (sometimes doesnt accept them )
have a look the settings are there

[bdgbill]

TVs are widescreen with a 16:9 ratio (sometimes written as 1.77) or a 16:10 (which is actually a computer monitor aspect ratio). DVDs and some movies that are broadcast are in the original aspect ration of the film which was designed for movie theaters. Standard cinema widescreen is 1.85 and CinemaScope Widescreen is 2.35, both of which are wider than the 16:9 ratio. This is the reason that there are black bars on the top and bottom. A 2.35 movie will have larger bars than a 1.85. The bars on a 2.35 source will cover roughly 25% of a 16:9 screen split between top and bottom.

Here is a good paper covering aspec ratios:
http://www.cinemasource.com/articles/aspect_ratios.pdf

Thanks,

The pdf was very good. I guess we will be living with black bars for some time to come.

[sub]

My Cable box is a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 4250HD. I have not really gotten into the STB too much. Just enough to realize that I could not key the screen shape to the channel number. Why would they forget this?? :mad:

The world of digital devices seems to focus on showing things in the correct aspect ratio (with black bars filling the unused space), and generally does a good job at this, but falls down miserably when it encounters a user that wants to have everything stretched to fullscreen and never see a black bar - even though there is a lot of people that want to do this.

[5058]

As far as I can tell my nVidia settings only allow 800x600 or 1024x768. I'm running 1024x768. My TV has a weird resolution of 1280x1080 (I call it "Not quite 1080P")

My Cable box is a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 4250HD. I have not really gotten into the STB too much. Just enough to realize that I could not key the screen shape to the channel number. Why would they forget this?? :mad:

Which upconverting DVD player did you get?

I have the Toshiba SD6000 - it is great , a bit slow to load DVD's or Divx but great picture when upconverted.

You 4250 will allow you to resize the sd content but I would suspect that the upscaling chip in your tv will do a better job , mine does.

You should install the latest nvidia drivers and try and run at 1366x768 if your tv is 720P or 1920x1080 is it's 1080p , the 1280x1080 resolution doesn't make sense?

just found this....
SDTV: 480i (640 x 480), EDTV: 480p (720 x 480), HDTV: 720p (1280 x 720), HDTV: 1080p (1920 x 1080).

[Deusxmachina]

You should install the latest nvidia drivers and try and run at 1366x768 if your tv is 720P or 1920x1080 is it's 1080p , the 1280x1080 resolution doesn't make sense?

1280x1080 and some other weird resolutions are unfortunately rather common when manufacturers try to save a buck.

[bdgbill]

You should install the latest nvidia drivers and try and run at 1366x768 if your tv is 720P or 1920x1080 is it's 1080p , the 1280x1080 resolution doesn't make sense?

I know it's a weird resolution. It's one of the reasons I bought this TV. It was the same price as many 720p sets but has a full 1080 lines of vertical resolution. This means that if i ever manage to get my hands on some 1080p content, it will only have to be scaled down horizontaly but not vertically.

TV specs are here