Strange Aspect Ratio Issue

[megamojo]

I'm having the strangest issue since switching over to Windows 7. When I watch SD content recorded from SD channels over clearQAM it is now letterboxed AND pillarboxed, making it take up a square in the center of my TV. I have a plain old tube SDTV, so letterboxing on widescreen content is standard for me. I am also a very experienced Sage user and this doesn't appear to have anything to do with the various aspect ratio settings in Sage.

I run into the occasional show on HD channels (I'm looking at you amazing race!) that is in 4:3 instead of widescreen with pillarboxing encoded in the signal, and sage adds letterboxing to fit it to my TV. In this case, the show, including the black bars on the side, is in 16:9 aspect ration, so I just set my 16:9 aspect ratio to zoom to 133% in both dimensions and set it to that instead of source for that show. Everything zooms in and fills the screen and there's no distortion. Though I don't watch any of these shows, I presume this is also what would happen if I watched old SD shows shown on an HD channel.

What's happening now is similar, but it's happening on all recordings from SD channels that happen to be recorded from digital clearQAM instead of analog. My cable company thankfully broadcasts every single "normal" channel in clearQAM along with the old analog channels. They also broadcast the local networks in HD clearQAM, and nothing else in HD without using a STB, but this is pretty standard practice. In the past I never had a problem watching the digital SD recordings. The filesizes are quite a bit smaller than standard analog captures since the signal is already digital, and the picture quality is noticeably better as well. There has never been any letterboxing or pillarboxing since the 4:3 content matches up fine to my 4:3 TV. Now all my digital SD recordings have black bars on all 4 sides, but it's not exactly the same as when the bars are purposely put on the sides such as in the situation described in the above paragraph. the bars are not quite as large, and if I switch to my zoomed 16:9 mode things are definitely distorted wider than they should be.

This appears to be a playback issue, not a recording issue because the problem still occurs when I watch shows that were recorded prior to switching over to Windows 7. The issue occurs on shows recorded from my HDHR and also from my Hauppauge 1600 and 1250, so it's not tuner specific. The black bars on the side seem to be part of the broadcast because they are slightly gray instead of the perfect black of the top/bottom bars added by sage. Even so they were always automatically excluded before, so I'm not sure what has changed. The thumbnails generated from these recordings are perfect and do not have any black bars. The only thing I've been able to do to fix this is use the SageTV Mpeg decoder. When I use that it works just fine and there are no black bars. When I use the ATI decoder (which i prefer to do because of the great hardware acceleration), the Microsoft decoder, or the cyberlink decoder from powerdvd9, I get the extra black bars.

I applied the native recording patch, update 10, and thought that had possibly caused the problem, but I've rolled back and actually uninstalled and re-installed SageTV, and the behavior has not changed at all.

Any ideas or troubleshooting steps I can take?

[megamojo]

*Bump*
Nobody else has ever experienced anything like this? I find that hard to believe. I've even temporarily removed my sageclient.properties file and let a fresh one be generated and the issue still remains. I've also tried switching between the VMR9 and EVR renderers, which also makes not difference at all.

[mickp]

Originally Posted by megamojo

*Bump*
Nobody else has ever experienced anything like this? I find that hard to believe. I've even temporarily removed my sageclient.properties file and let a fresh one be generated and the issue still remains. I've also tried switching between the VMR9 and EVR renderers, which also makes not difference at all.

It's a little difficult to follow exactly what the pattern is here but I'll give it a go... It sounds like you're describing that 4:3 shows recorded on a digital broadcast are transmitted as 16:9 with pillar-boxing in them. When you display these on a 16:9 display you expect there to be black bars to the left and right of the 4:3 display. When your display is a 4:3 device and you're viewing 16:9 material, you would expect to see the full width of the screen taken up with black bars at top and bottom. Combine the two and you get a little box that needs to be zoomed.

I know I'm missing the point you're making somewhere along the line here sorry.

I still use 4:3 displays on my desktop machine (2x 22" Mitsubishi Diamontrons that I can't bring myself to part with) and find that it's better to switch to my 4x3 aspect ratio when watching 4x3 content that would otherwise have black bars all around.

The analog recordings you mention will always be 4:3 recordings in my experience though different playback drivers may actually have the wherewithall to automagically zoom these for you. That seems to be what you're suggesting with the Sage codec.

The behavior that you're describing sounds normal.

It's not immediately obvious (imho) so forgive me for re-stating what you may already be aware of:

There are four aspect ratio settings that appear in SageMC (Fill, Source, 4x3, 16x9). I assume similar options are given in the default stv. The zoom and offset for each of these can be changed independently of each other. Select one with right click or ctrl-o/Aspect ratio mode then modify the zoom with ctro-o/Edit aspect ratio.

On my desktop (4:3 displays) I have my 4x3 aspect ratio set to Zoom Width 140%, Zoom Height 100% and this seems to be correct for 16:9 content that is actually 4:3 (pillar-boxed). My 16x9 aspect ratio is set to 100%, 100% and works fine for actual 16:9 content displayed on a 4:3 display.

NB: I've never taken much notice of what the settings are for the Fill and Source aspect ratios. They are both set to 100%, 100% on my system yet have different effects so the % of stretch are modifiers for whatever aspect changing they're doing by default.

I haven't had any analog tuners in my system for years but would expect that these should require no zooming on your system. If you need to though you could possibly select the Fill aspect ratio and adjust as necessary.

Mick.

[megamojo]

I'm well aware of all the aspect ratio settings and understand them just fine. What you're describing is exactly normal when you're watching an HD broadcast that's normally 16:9 and there's a 4:3 show in there, they add black bars (pillarboxing) on the sides. I encounter this plenty and have my 16:9 aspect ratio set to zoom to 133% in both dimensions to make up for this. This is not what is occuring here. It seems like we need some pictures here instead of my confusing and overly wordy explanations.

These first 2 pictures show what you think I'm describing, which is 4:3 content inside a 16:9 broadcast. It's on an HD channel, and sage agrees that it's 16:9 and says: "File Format: MPEG2-PS[MPEG2-Video 16:9 1080i@29.97fps, AC3/384Kbps@48kHz Stereo eng ]" The first picture is a commercial which is completely 4:3, and the second picture is the show itself, which has another set of black bars since when it was originally created it was intended to be broadcast in 4:3 with the black bars to letterbox it. I completely understand the black bars on the side which are added to the digital broadcast to make it fit, and I understand the pure black bars on the top and bottom added by sage to make it fit my TV. I also understand the grey black bars that were part of the old original broadcast. This situation can be completely cured by simply setting your 16:9 aspect ratio to zoom to 133% in both dimensions.




This next set of pictures shows what I'm actually describing. This is 4:3 content inside of a 4:3 broadcast. Sage says: "File Format: MPEG2-PS[MPEG2-Video 4:3 544x480i@29.97fps, AC3/192Kbps@48kHz Stereo]" Again the first picture shows a commercial which should completely fill the screen, and the second is the actual show which does have some letterboxing, but this is not the broken part.




Other than the grey letterboxing of the second picture, there should be no letter or pillarboxing in these pictures, and yet there is. For some reason sage thinks there's extra material on the sides and adds letterboxing to make up for it. If I leave the aspect ratio setting on source you get what i've posted here. If I put it on 4:3 or fill it gets rid of the letterboxing, but the pillarboxing remains and everything is stretched taller than it should be. If I use my zoomed 16:9 setting, it does get rid of all the black bars, but everything is stretched wider than it should be.

If I use the SageTV mpeg decoder I do not experience this issue, but I do with every other decoder I've tried, including the ATI decoder, Cyberlink decoder, and Microsoft decoder. If I open the files in an external media player there is no problem. I also do not experience this issue on recordings that are actually analog. It occurs on digital recordings of standard definition channels. As I said in the first post, this seems to be a playback issue rather than a recording issue since shows that were recorded prior to my switching to windows 7 still have the same problem.

[mickp]

I knew I was missing something . Are there any aspect ratio/scaling settings in the Catalyst driver that could be interfering with things?

Mick.

[megamojo]

Originally Posted by mickp

I knew I was missing something . Are there any aspect ratio/scaling settings in the Catalyst driver that could be interfering with things?

Mick.

That's certainly worth looking into. With the amount of video processing that the cards are doing nowadays that wouldn't surprise me. It would also explain why the issue occurs with every decoder except the sage one, since I did not enable the use of DXVA in the configuration. Thanks for suggesting something I hadn't thought of!

[megamojo]

Update: It's definitely Catalyst's fault. If I enable DXVA Hardware acceleration with the Sage Decoder (which only works with EVR, with VMR9 I just get a black screen for some reason) then the problem occurs with that decoder as well, if I toggle DXVA off the problem goes away. There are no settings in the catalyst control center to fix it. I tried dropping back to catalyst 9.10 to fix it but that didn't change anything. Now that I've gotten to the bottom of the issue it really doesn't bother me so much anymore since I rarely watch non-HD content anyways. I hope ATI will fix this in a future release of their drivers but until then it's not too big of a deal to switch encoders to watch non-HD content.

[koan00]

You never responded directly, but did you disable the scaling in the Catalyst driver? I know they moved it around under windows 7 and it took a while for me to find the new location.

[megamojo]

Originally Posted by koan00

You never responded directly, but did you disable the scaling in the Catalyst driver? I know they moved it around under windows 7 and it took a while for me to find the new location.

What is this scaling you're talking about? Apparently it's something I don't know about, and it sounds like it would fix my problem. Please share!

edit: I searched and found this: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=44913
Is there something else besides what they reference in that thread? I checked on mine and there's no scaling option, probably because it's a standard-def tube TV and not an HDTV. Hopefully we get christmas bonuses at work this year and I can finally get a modern TV.

[koan00]

This is what I am referring to:
http://www.aoclarkejr.com/ati-cataly...n-options.html

[megamojo]

I played with the overscan settings, it just moves too much stuff offscreen and still doesn't solve the issue. Also, I didn't explicitly mention it before, but the problem is still present when I have sage running in a small window, not just fullscreen. If I get motivated enough I may try to submit a big report to ATI, but at this point I'm just happy to have a definite cause to the problem even if I don't have a solution.

[koan00]

I think a temporary work around would be just to edit on the the aspect ratio options in Sage to adjust the scale for these types of shows, and then just change to that special display ratio when needed. This would be a bit easier to do that switching encoders.

[megamojo]

That's not a bad idea. I'd use source for shows that don't need correction, 16:9 for situations like that first set of pictures up there, and 4:3 for these shows.