(Or have they stopped bothering?) SD Freeview.
On my elderly but still functional Panasonic TV (TX-L22X20B), when 4:3 material was being transmitted - properly, rather than including the
black bars sometimes with a dog in them - such as the original (and
sometimes startlingly green due to film fading!) All Creatures Great and Small, and assorted other programmes (such as some BBC4 archive music programmes), the TV displayed it wrongly - i. e. filling the full width,
so appearing squashed or stretched - unless I turned the subtitles off.
(I presume doing subtitles _and_ rendering the picture pillarboxed was
just too much processing load for whatever processor it contains.) If I turned subtitles off, the picture appeared properly pillarboxed.
But recently, such material is filling the screen whether I turn the subtitles off or not; I've noticed it on the Catherine Cookson stuff on channel 20 on Sunday afternoons (I _think_ that has changed and used to
be displayable correctly), and I'm seeing it now on the Mastermind 1977
being shown on channel 9 (BBC Four) now (Monday 7, 21:00) - i. e. it's appearing full-screen, so squashed or stretched, regardless of whether I
have subtitles on or not.
Since I very much doubt there has been any OTA firmware "up" (down) date
of such an old set, have the broadcasters just abandoned setting the
flag altogether? Seems to apply to both BBC and whoever is responsible
for channel 20 (U&Drama). (If they have, I'd rather have the broadcast include the side black bars - at least the picture would not be distorted.)
On my bedrrom setup (HD-capable TEKNIKAL set-top box), BBC4 SD on
channel 9 is also showing the old Mastermind full-screen (stretched); on
HD (channel 106) it is showing correctly, i. e. pillarboxed. (Toggling subtitles makes no difference on either resolution, but I wasn't
expecting it to on that setup.)
Some channels use the widescreen flag properly: they broadcast 4:3
archive programmes using the full 720 pixels of width, and set the flag
to tell the TV "display this in the centre of the screen and do not
stretch 4:3 to 16:9". Some of the UKTV channels (eg Drama, Yesterday)
used to do this at every transition between 16:9 adverts and 4:3 programme.
Mainstream channels such as BBC1 and ITV broadcast everything as 16:9,
so 4:3 programmes occupy the centre of the 16:9 frame and hence only a proportion of the 720 pixels are used: the rest is used for the black border. This means that the horizontal resolution of the picture is crap
(to use a technical term!).
HD is always 16:9 and there is, as far as I know, no flag.
It's up to the people who configure things at the studio and transmitter
to correctly add appropriate black bars when necessary.
Mainstream channels such as BBC1 and ITV broadcast everything as 16:9,
so 4:3 programmes occupy the centre of the 16:9 frame and hence only a >proportion of the 720 pixels are used: the rest is used for the black >border. This means that the horizontal resolution of the picture is crap
(to use a technical term!).
In article <118702e$u449$1@dont-email.me>, NY <me@privacy.net> wrote:Very true. Except... Old 4:3 programmes were made using analogue cameras
Mainstream channels such as BBC1 and ITV broadcast everything as 16:9,
so 4:3 programmes occupy the centre of the 16:9 frame and hence only a
proportion of the 720 pixels are used: the rest is used for the black
border. This means that the horizontal resolution of the picture is crap
(to use a technical term!).
Do they use the same bitrate as for 16:9 programs? If so, there
should be less compression which will to some extent compensate
for the lower resolution.
On 14/09/2026 10:55, Richard Tobin wrote:
In article <118702e$u449$1@dont-email.me>, NY <me@privacy.net> wrote:
Mainstream channels such as BBC1 and ITV broadcast everything as 16:9,
so 4:3 programmes occupy the centre of the 16:9 frame and hence only a
proportion of the 720 pixels are used: the rest is used for the black
border. This means that the horizontal resolution of the picture is crap >>> (to use a technical term!).
Do they use the same bitrate as for 16:9 programs? If so, there
should be less compression which will to some extent compensate
for the lower resolution.
Very true. Except... Old 4:3 programmes were made using analogue cameras
and stored on analogue videotape. This introduces noise that doesn't compress well. BBC channels often increase the bitrate of
made-on-analogue archive programmes to compensate for this. Some other broadcasters don't bother - and the picture quality is worse.
Mainstream channels such as BBC1 and ITV broadcast everything as 16:9,
so 4:3 programmes occupy the centre of the 16:9 frame and hence only a proportion of the 720 pixels are used: the rest is used for the black border. This means that the horizontal resolution of the picture is
crap (to use a technical term!).
NY <me@privacy.net> wrote in news:118702e$u449$1@dont-email.me:
Mainstream channels such as BBC1 and ITV broadcast everything as 16:9,
so 4:3 programmes occupy the centre of the 16:9 frame and hence only a
proportion of the 720 pixels are used: the rest is used for the black
border. This means that the horizontal resolution of the picture is
crap (to use a technical term!).
The effective resolution left is 540x576. That is absolutely adequate
for SD. 720 pixel columns is higher resolution than analogue PAL ever
was.
Given that almost every TV nowadays uses a non-CRT display, so the whole screen is illuminated for the whole frame, interlaced or progressive is fairly irrelevant: it's a difference only of delivery, rather than of display.
(*) In the same way that the analogue bandwidth was limited to about 5.5
MHz which limits horizontal resolution. 5.5*10^6 / (625*25) = 352, which
is 352 pairs of alternate black/white pixels, so 704 pixels in total.
And lo-and-behold, that's exactly the resolution that the BBC uses,
whereas a lot of other broadcasters add 16 pixels to give 720.
Yes, the relevant prog.s (e. g. vintage Mastermind), when I looked on my
HD set (when they were being broadcast on an HD channel as well as an SD one), were correctly pillarboxed. It's just when viewed on my SD set (on
an SD channel, obviously), or the HD set on an SD channel, they have
started to appear full-screen, and thus distorted (squashed/stretched).
Yes, the relevant prog.s (e. g. vintage Mastermind), when I looked on my
HD set (when they were being broadcast on an HD channel as well as an SD one), were correctly pillarboxed. It's just when viewed on my SD set (on
an SD channel, obviously), or the HD set on an SD channel, they have
started to appear full-screen, and thus distorted (squashed/stretched).
Until sometime in the last month or so, that set displayed such material pillarboxed automatically (though for some reason I had to turn
subtitles off for that to work). Now it doesn't; I can only assume that
the broadcasters - who are clearly broadcasting the material full-width
- have stopped setting the flag.
On 14/09/2026 03:12, J. P. Gilliver wrote:
Yes, the relevant prog.s (e. g. vintage Mastermind), when I looked on my
HD set (when they were being broadcast on an HD channel as well as an SD
one), were correctly pillarboxed. It's just when viewed on my SD set (on
an SD channel, obviously), or the HD set on an SD channel, they have
started to appear full-screen, and thus distorted (squashed/stretched).
I think maybe it's just being done because some people (idiots?) like it better that way.
"I paid a fortune for this huge screen, why aren't you using all of it?"
Much in the same way that some people will stretch a photo to fill a gap left for it on a website even if it means the photo gets horribly
stretched or squashed.
On 14/09/2026 03:12, J. P. Gilliver wrote:
Yes, the relevant prog.s (e. g. vintage Mastermind), when I looked on my
HD set (when they were being broadcast on an HD channel as well as an SD
one), were correctly pillarboxed. It's just when viewed on my SD set (on
an SD channel, obviously), or the HD set on an SD channel, they have
started to appear full-screen, and thus distorted (squashed/stretched).
Until sometime in the last month or so, that set displayed such material
pillarboxed automatically (though for some reason I had to turn
subtitles off for that to work). Now it doesn't; I can only assume that
the broadcasters - who are clearly broadcasting the material full-width
- have stopped setting the flag.
Have you ever seen any of the Indian news channels on satellite? They
are full of feeds from events or remote studios at the wrong aspect ratio?
I suspect the BBC is almost unique among the worlds broadcasters in
really wanting to do everything correctly and in the highest possible quality.
They're better than many - but the vintage Mastermind I was watching was
on a BBC channel (2 or 4). The HS version (102 or 106) _was_ correctly pillarboxed, but the SD one was not.
On 19/09/2026 00:38, J. P. Gilliver wrote:
They're better than many - but the vintage Mastermind I was watching was
on a BBC channel (2 or 4). The HD version (102 or 106) _was_ correctly
pillarboxed, but the SD one (2 or 9) was not.
Ah, now that does seem unusual to me, but recently I haven't been
watching a huge amount of off air TV.
Perhaps you should double check you don't have a setting like Letterbox/PanScan/Scale/Auto somewhere in you TV or set top box that has been set wrongly. My satellite box has this, and weirdly PanScan is the correct setting, not Auto! I think I've seen similar settings on TVs too.
The effective resolution left is 540x576. That is absolutely adequate
for SD. 720 pixel columns is higher resolution than analogue PAL ever
was.
Is it? I thought that 720 was chosen specifically (*) to be about 4/3 of
the number of rows (576),
Given that almost every TV nowadays uses a non-CRT display, so the whole screen is illuminated for the whole frame, interlaced or progressive is fairly irrelevant: it's a difference only of delivery, rather than of display.
(*) In the same way that the analogue bandwidth was limited to about 5.5
MHz which limits horizontal resolution. 5.5*10^6 / (625*25) = 352, which
is 352 pairs of alternate black/white pixels, so 704 pixels in total.
The effective resolution left is 540x576. That is absolutely adequate
for SD. 720 pixel columns is higher resolution than analogue PAL ever
was.
Is it? I thought that 720 was chosen specifically (*) to be about 4/3 of
the number of rows (576),
Given that almost every TV nowadays uses a non-CRT display, so the whole screen is illuminated for the whole frame, interlaced or progressive is fairly irrelevant: it's a difference only of delivery, rather than of display.
(*) In the same way that the analogue bandwidth was limited to about 5.5
MHz which limits horizontal resolution. 5.5*10^6 / (625*25) = 352, which
is 352 pairs of alternate black/white pixels, so 704 pixels in total.
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