[mythtv-users] Is Wider better?

Jonathan Rogers jonner at teegra.net
Tue May 1 23:55:25 UTC 2007


On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 11:18 +1200, Steve Hodge wrote:

> 
> So the broadcasters letterbox all widescreen SD content in the US?
> Over here in NZ we've currently got the opposite problem: one of the
> stations is broadcasting everything widescreen (at least on DVB-S) and
> pillarboxing 4:3 content. Also very annoying.

Actually, I've seen both problems here on ATSC broadcasts, near
Charlotte, North Carolina. Two PBS stations broadcast several streams
each of 480i during the day, and a 1080i and a 480i at night. However,
many of the programs on the 4:3 480i broadcasts are 16:9, and therefore
letterboxed. All of the commercial stations broadcast all of their
programs on a single HD stream each, though of course, most of the
programs are still SD.

The worst abuse of the system I've seen yet is one station that
broadcasted reruns of a popular HD show on their 1080i stream. Though
the new episodes were actually HD, the old reruns obviously came from an
NTSC source, probably analog tape. These video streams had black bars
completely surrounding the image in the actual 1080i frame, since the
letterboxing came from the tape or whatever and the pillarboxing came
from the 1080i upconversion. Apparently, they were too lazy or
incompetent to configure their conversion system to simply scale the
NTSC video up to fill the 1080i one, so I had to do that with MythTV,
which resulted in a poor image.
> 
-- 
Jonathan Rogers <jonner at teegra.net>
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