[mythtv-users] Is Wider better?

[Jonathan Rogers]

On Wed, 2007-05-02 at 11:45 +1200, Steve Hodge wrote:
> 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.

While anamorphic broadcast is possible, I don't know if it exists in
NTSC countries; I certainly haven't seen it. I have seen many
letterboxed programs on NTSC and ATSC 480i. Are you saying that MythTV
would detect an anamorphic broadcast and display it correctly? MythDVD
does display both 4:3 and 16:9 from the 720x480 DVD video, but that's
part of the DVD spec and encoded in the MPEG stream. 
> 
-- 
Jonathan Rogers <jonner at teegra.net>
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