Charter TV in St. Louis - standard def channels aspect ration

[lo123]

Noticed recently that the standard def channels on Charter no longer fill the screen of my Panasonic plasma TV. Looking at various web postings it appears this is related to how the upstream content providers are sending their signal to Charter.

Anyone else experiencing this? Other than resizing each standard def channel each time I change channels, anyone have a silver bullet solution?

We have digital TV service, expanded basic analog and a high def cable box with a variety of high def stations. These also sometimes display in the wrong aspect ration, usually corrects by switching to another station but with no discernible pattern.

[JJkizak]

When you say "fill the screen" do you mean vertically with black bars on the side or horizontally with no black bars, (zoomed).

JJK

[WMcD]

I doubt there is any automatic solution but maybe you have a sophisticated monitor or cable box -- I don't know.

Here in Chicago I have the cheapo RCN cable. It is all standard resolution so what comes out of the cable box is NTSC or about 480 x 620 like VGA..

TCM presents some movies in letter box form. So it is a widescreen aspect with bars on the top and bottom. Let me guess that cuts down available lines from 480 to 360. The widesceen TV has the usual bars on the side for when playing standard 4;3 aspect. The zoom control on the monitor converts it to a larger image with the correct widescreen aspect. Still, the vertical resolution is bout 360 (the other lines are in the black bars) lines even if interpolated by the monitor..

A new channel is EBRU. It has some programming in anamorphic -- at least from what I see. That means that the image is sent compressed in the horizontal but without letterboxing -- you get all 480 lines of vertical. There is a "stretch" (in distinction to side stretch) adjustment on the monitor so that the horizontal compression is undone and thus I get a pretty good definition.

While were here: Hollywood went to widescreen in the 1950s to combat the threat of TV. The technique was to use lenses (Panavision?) on the camera to compress the widescreen view down to the standard 4:3 filmstock image. Then special lenses were used on projectors at the movie house to undo the compression. Very clever -- the only hardware change was the lenses and a wider screen in the theater. Cameras, filmstock, etc. remained the same.

Without letterboxing, widescreen movies on TV just lopped off the sides. The problem was that the credits ran to the edges so the credits on TV were sometimes left compressed (not lopped off). So if there is an image behind the credits, it often looks skinny (compressed).

WMcD

[lo123]

When you say "fill the screen" do you mean vertically with black bars on the side or horizontally with no black bars, (zoomed).

Previously, I'm fairly certain we had no bars on the side and sure did not notice any along the top.

So, tonight, I found a button on the TV remote "format", which provides several "zoom" settings. Interestingly, the Zoom feature in the Menus is greyed out and not accessible.

Using ths remote button, we now can set standard def channels to a moderately acceptable size, which fills the screen horizontally and vertically.

For the HD channels, this format button does not seem to quite get us to what we had before, but it is close.

Conclusion: either Charter changed their signal or someone in the family "bumped" the format button on the remote. We've never used that button before, so possible it was accidentally activated.

Now if I could just get my PS3 to reliably play standard def DVDs in Dolby 5.1 and someday figure out if it really will play SACD's in 5.1 surround........

Ahhhhhhh, technology.