Odd aspect ratio

[encoder]

On Travel Channel HD, I notice some HD programs are broadcast in this odd aspect ratio in which the picture fills the top and bottom of the screen and there are thin bars on left and right. It's somewhere between the 16:9 (or 1.78) full HD and 4:3 (1.33) SD. When I measured the picture dimensions I got an aspect ratio of about 1.55.

Anyone know the origin of this ratio?

[SiliconJoe]

Originally Posted by encoder

I notice some HD programs are broadcast in this odd aspect ratio in which the picture fills the top and bottom of the screen and there are thin bars on left and right...Anyone know the origin of this ratio?

It's not an odd aspect ratio. Depending on how you are receiving the digital signal, how you have things connected to your television, and the capabilities of your television, you will occasionally see strange aspect ratio screens.

If your television or set top box has an aspect button, try pressing it and cycling through the various configs until the channel displays correctly. BeyondTV also can change the aspect ratio, it's one of the menu buttons on the FireFly Mini. The only time I mess with it is when 4:3 content was broadcast on a station that is transmitting at 720P or 1080i. I set the aspect to PillarBox and the small image fills the screen perfectly, not overzoomed at all.

[koan00]

I think it comes from upscaling and cropping 4:3 content. I see the same behaviour on the show "Destroyed in seconds" on Discovery.

It's not as bad as so much of the HGTV content where they actually broadcast stretched content :/

[encoder]

Originally Posted by SiliconJoe

It's not an odd aspect ratio. Depending on how you are receiving the digital signal, how you have things connected to your television, and the capabilities of your television, you will occasionally see strange aspect ratio screens.

I'm pretty sure my settings are correct. This is confirmed when HD commericals in 16:9 within the same recording take up the full screen. Neither the program nor any of the 16:9 full screen commercials shows any distortion due to stretching. So I think the program itself was deliberately cropped to this unusual aspect ratio.

[encoder]

Originally Posted by koan00

I think it comes from upscaling and cropping 4:3 content. I see the same behaviour on the show "Destroyed in seconds" on Discovery.

This sounds like a plausible explanation. Maybe the programs were originally stored in 640x480 SD and were upscaled 3x to 1920x1440 and then cropped? If true then for some reason the cropping is not done to scale in vertical and horizontal pixels - more pixels (in proportional terms) are cropped in horizontal lines (from 1440 to 1080 lines) than in vertical columns (from 1920 to whatever), thus giving a frame aspect ratio somewhere between 4:3 and 16:9.

I'm also seeing the same thing in some shows on Animal Planet HD like The Most Extreme series and Pet Star.

[Bigbird999]

The TV wouldn't be one of those older plasmas with rectangular pixels, would it? There is a setting for rectangular pixels in BTV settings, mabe it is not set correctly for your TV (ie nabled when it shouldn't be). Probably not the issue, but, who knows........ After all, it is a PC

BB

[encoder]

Originally Posted by Bigbird999

The TV wouldn't be one of those older plasmas with rectangular pixels, would it?

My HDTV is a late model Samsung LCD with 1:1 square pixel mapping on the HDMI input.