On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 08:18:44PM -0600, Paul Miller wrote: > > I read somewhere that all HD sources use a 16:9 aspect ratio. My > television is 4:3. Should the DVI signal still be 16:9?
DVI contains no information on aspect ratio, as far as I know, it's a digital version of component video. I have not played with 4:3 HDTVs. They are rarer (though they actually make sense in the transition period when most of your content is still 4:3. During this mixed period you are going to "waste" screen real estate one way or another by watching stuff of a different aspect ratio on your tube. If you think it will mostly be 4:3 you watch your choice makes sense, though it will make less sense in a few years.) I can imagine a few ways this might work a) The TV pretends to be a 16:9 TV when it sees a signal with 720 or 1080 lines. Unfortunately it can't tell with 480 lines what you are sending. Well with DVI it could count pixels, but I have not heard of that, since the TVs also have component and mostly use it. b) The TV has a mode on it you put in to tell it when to pretend to be a 16:9 TV. In the pretending mode, it only displays into a 16:9 box with letterbox bars done by the TV. c) The TV is a 4:3 TV. Your transmitting box is expected to know this. Thus you would feed it 1280 x 960, not 1280x720, and 1920 x 1440, not 1920 x 1080. Your box would be putting in the letterbox bars. This is what myth and xvideo will do, it's what you get if you run Myth on your computer monitor. Now C seems most likely. All HDTV STBs have a menu setting asking if the TV is widescreen or 4:3 in them. Myth doesn't have one per se, you have to put fields into xorg.conf and edit the command lines myth uses to call mplayer to make it work on a 16:9 TV -- which you don't have, so you're golden! What I don't know is if the HTDV STBs know as much about 4:3 based HDTVs. I presume they do since they are rarer but not unknown. A proper 4:3 HDTV has to have more than 1080 lines of course, it needs 1440 to do the full res. Which I believe the fancy Sony does.
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