[mythtv-users] Is Wider better?

[Steve Hodge]

On 5/2/07, Jonathan Rogers <jonner at teegra.net> wrote:
>
> On Tue, 2007-05-01 at 16:39 -0400, Cool Frood wrote:
> > Also, you needn't worry about capturing SD content with your PVR 350
> > to display on a widescreen.  MythTV does the Right Thing (TM) out of
> > the box.
>
> Well, that's correct if you mean that MythTV records the video from the
> PVR-350 and then plays it back unmodified. If you record widescreen
> video using a PVR-350 or any NTSC (which is inherently 4:3) capture
> card, it must be letterboxed. If you then play that video back on a wide
> screen, it'll end up with pillarboxing in addition to the letterboxing.


Is there letterboxing present in the original video? If there is then it's
not really widescreen video - it's 4:3 video that happens to contain
letterboxed widescreen content. True widescreen video is recorded by the
capture card without any letterboxing. It's not recording in a 16:9
resolution, it's effectively compressed horizontally (i.e. it's recorded as
anamorphic widescreen video). If you play it back on a 16:9 screen it will
appear correctly without any black bars.

That does get me thinking about how hard it would be for MythTV to
> detect when there's a letterboxed image and automatically switch to a
> zommed mode. Perhaps it wouldn't be that hard.
>

If the video is correctly flagged as 16:9 then it's easy. If the video is
letterboxed it should be possible. But if the video is anamorphic and it's
not flagged then it would be extremely difficult if it's possible at all. Of
course in the later case you don't need the zoom mode anyway.

Cheers,
Steve
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