HD Aspect Ratio Newbie

[MattJackson86]

I have a question about HDTV. I have been using sage with SD content for a while. I have a widescreen tv and my sage aspect ratio is on "Fill". All my content looks great. I just got the HDHomerun and some HD channels look awesome and are 16x9. Others are 4:3. My question is why are they 4:3 (Are they meant to be), how can I get them to fill the full screen (do i even want this or will it look bad).

Also (Not a sage question) KCET in HD is tiny...the image looks 16x9 but there logo is outside the picture not inside like most other channels....so the picture is only filling 2/3 the screen. Any idea whats up with that?

Finally, some of my hd channels have a "static" looking bar across the top of the screen (only a thin line). Why is this and can it be fixed (software? tuning issue?)

[ke6guj]

the way I run Sage is to leave it on "source" for most content. 16:9 HD will fill the entire screen, and 4:3 SD content will be pillarboxed with black bars on the sides.

For 16:9 content that is displayed in letterbox format in a 4:3 broadcast, if left alone will be both letterboxed and pillarboxed, also called "postage-stamped". With that, I set up my 16:9 Aspect ratio to zoom in 133% horizontally and vertically. That way the 16:9 content zooms out to completely fill the screen.


The static bar that you see is most likely the CC data stream. That portion of the screen is usually off the screen on a regular TV, and called overscan. In Sage, you can finetune the aspect ratio settings to push that bar off the edge of the screen.

edit: I use the auto aspect-ratio switcher, http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14146 , to automate switching aspect ratios based on my rules that fit my content.