Aspect Ratio Issue, letter boxing a 16:9 picture

[PAF]

I am having a problem with the way the sage extenders, both the HD100 and HD 200, sends the signal to my TVs. When watching any programming, the picture is always letterboxed, which is weird especially if watching stuff on the high def. channels such as House, which is in 1:78 ratio... Btw, the TVs are a toshiba 42 inch LCD and a samsung 58 inch plasma and both connect via HDMI and Sage 6.6 is running on WHS with SageMC (I'm not sure about default... I'll give this a try tonight (2/8)). Both TVs are also set to display in native resolution. (OMG there are a lot of places to screw up your aspect ratio... ). The strangest thing is that both display the menus in the correct aspect ratio. Any idea how to fix this?

I also know there is an aspect ratio button to stretch, etc. but I don't want to keep using fill to get the correct ratio. The aspect is default as source and it creates a letter box with a 16:9 TV and a 16:9 Source. Same thing happens when watching "The Mist" DVD, which is shot in 1:85. So while there should be a slight letterbox with the mist, it shouldn't be as big as a 2:...\

I think this person is also having the same issue... http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...t=aspect+ratio

[paulbeers]

It sounds like you have your aspect ratios all goofed up.

You can permanently set your aspect ratios by hitting Options while playing back a show. There should be an option in this menu to tell your HD100/HD200 what aspect ratio you want it to default to. If you set it anywhere else (such as the setup menu) it will not fix your issue.

You also need to make sure you set your HD100/HD200 to use a 16:9 screen and not a 4:3. You need to access this in the setup menu in the user interface (or whatever the first option is in the Setup Menu).


Try these two things first, and then report back if you are still having problems.

[adamwh]

I see this on certain DVDs. The two I can think of off the top of my head are Monsters, Inc. and Beauty & the Beast. Instead of getting a nice 16x9 image, it looks like somewhere in the chain it is letterboxing the original image into a letterboxed 4:3 image, then it is being letterboxed a second time somewhere further down the chain as well as stretched horizontally to fill the 16x9 screen. Hitting Fill instead of Source does solve the aspect ratio issue, but there's noticable scaling artifacts as if Fill is only using the already downsampled 4:3 letterbox image scaled up to fill the screen.

If it's a settings issue, then its a very obscure one as everything else displays correctly (source: 16x9, display: 16x9, default AR: source).

[paulbeers]

Yes but is your 16:9 source, actually a 16:9 source that has been pre-letter boxed to 4:3 by the vendor? I have this problem with a few of my DVD's. This does cause Sage to display with black bars on all sidessince it is seeing that DVD as a 4:3 image (since it is).

[PAF]

I double checked the extenders and they are set to display in 16:9 format.

Thanks for the tip on setting the default but now that adamwh mentions it, using fill in does create artifacts because of the mocking with the aspect ratio.

I don't think its a problem with the actual source because the high def. channels that are 1.78 native are becoming letter boxed as if you were watching a 2.10 or something close to that.

Now that you guys mention it, it does feel like like it thinks its a 4:3 and then its letterboxing a 16:9 signal which results in a 16:9 screen with a letter boxed 16:9 source. I'm going to go dig around to see where else it selects the aspect ration. Maybe in the extender properties file?

[adamwh]

Originally Posted by paulbeers

Yes but is your 16:9 source, actually a 16:9 source that has been pre-letter boxed to 4:3 by the vendor? I have this problem with a few of my DVD's. This does cause Sage to display with black bars on all sidessince it is seeing that DVD as a 4:3 image (since it is).

They are definitely 16x9 DVDs that should fill the 16x9 screen without any bars. It is not letterboxing it to 4x3 and then pillar boxing it on the sides. The resulting image is one that fills the screen horizontially, but is squished vertically. The bars are being added somewhere in SageTV, they don't exist in the source.

[adamwh]

Just a side note: I finally got a chance to check the client software for this issue and the same DVDs that have weird aspect ratios on the extender play back with the correct aspect ratio in the software client. All is not completely well, though, because it looks like there's a de-interlacing issue. I'm thinking these DVDs are encoded a little strangely, but it's something that a stand-alone DVD player can handle readily.