I watch some programs on PBS TV that are strangely formatted. The video image is bordered on all 4 sides by black. This makes for a quite smaller image.
If this were an aspect ration issue the image would be either full width or full height (bars on only 2 sides).
What's the reason for this odd formatting?
A better forum in which to ask this?
Thanks.
What's likely happening is that the broadcast is adding the top and bottom borders, because the broadcast is in a 4:3 aspect ratio, but the program is a wide-screen format like 16:9 or whatever. Then your wide-screen TV takes the
4:3 broadcast and adds borders of its own, resulting in borders on all sides.Dig through your TV's menus to see if any combination of its zoom and aspect ratio options helps.
That would be the expected case if the broadcast itself didn't have the black bars embedded in the video.
not enough pixels in the video?
That's a 16:9 program reduced and padded to 4:3 (top bars) and then reduced and padded again to 16:9 (side bars). Sometimes PBS will run it through that cycle twice and transmit it at 640x480i to make sure that it's completely destroyed.
Digital TV's have a "zoom" mode to get rid of the padding caused by cyclic conversion. Some TVs, like Panasonic, have upscaling and de-interlacing bugs while zoomed so it may look worse.
Digital TV's may have zoom, but Usenet has digital echo.
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