I agree. I suspect doing this would make SD channels incompatible for SD only subs, but you'd think they could figure out some way to do both. They figured it out for DVD's way back in 1999. Widescreen SD would improve resolution.
1/28/2015 12:30 - Uplink Report - 109 Changes
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I agree. I suspect doing this would make SD channels incompatible for SD only subs, but you'd think they could figure out some way to do both. They figured it out for DVD's way back in 1999. Widescreen SD would improve resolution.
No, I mean, channel 144 on the guide, formerly ESPN2, now has the Pac-12 Network logo on it instead of ESPN2.
No it's not. Pac 12 is wholly owned by the conference, with no outside ownership or partnership from espn, fox or any other network group
It would be nice if Charlie or somebody would get asked about this at CES or Team Summit or wherever.
Letterboxed SD could possibly be blown up to a tolerable widescreen picture IF it was being presented at a decent bit rate, but on Dish it often isn't -- not even with MPEG4 for some reason! (Although MPEG4 at least looks better than MPEG2. A lot of Dish's MPEG2 SD channels were intolerable even when they WEREN'T blown up.) Sending a widescreen SD picture and letting the receiver figure out what to do with it would be the sensible thing to do.
There most probably is a setting on the tv that will expand SD signals. I stumbled on it on at least 2 of my tvs. Go into your Picture settings and look for it.
You can zoom your Dish receiver and choose the one that lets the letterbox cover the screen. Only takes a second. Push the * button right below the 7 button.
When I changed the picture settings on the TV's, it only changed for programs not in full screen. For example it expanded Universal Sports to full screen. It did not effect anything already full screen.
That's my point. When you zoom the picture, you lose resolution. Digital anamorphic encoding is used on DVD's. There must be some similar way to do this with SD on Dish, without either zooming the picture or providing two separate streams of the same channel (One for widescreen, one 4x3).
Resolution isn't lost. The pixels are still the pixels -- they're just bigger.
The stage where resolution may have been lost is where the conversion from HD to SD happened.
When you can convince all of the providers and TV stations to enable flagging of the content or commit to a single conversion methodology, come back and we'll talk. I don't think it is reasonable to have the carriers babysitting each channel to monitor what the appropriate aspect ratio should be (especially where the provider uses out-of-safe-area bugs).
This may very well be. I admit I don't know much about this, but it seems reasonable to assume that if you zoom in to view 16x9 full screen in a 4x3 image it won't look as good as having the 16x9 image to begin with.
Yeah, that ain't gonna happen I agree. As it stands now, Dish would need to down convert a channel's HD feed and flag it, or include both a down converted HD feed and the 4x3 SD feed on two separate channels.
