I have a cheap DSE SD STB. Last week, it died, tripping the Earth Leakage Detector, crashing my computer while I was working (grrrrr).

There were lots of things that irritated me about the el cheapo DSE box - it wouldn't automatically change the aspect ratio when the stream you were watching changed from normal to WS. As in if you had it set on 4:3 Letterbox watching something in WS, as soon as you change to a non-WS channel, it would put black bars around all 4 edges of the picture. I assume that better STBs will automatically switch the settings when this happens, right? Is this referred to as Active Format Descriptor (AFD)?

Which SD boxes in Australia have this feature? Looking on the DSE online store, none of the STBs mention such a feature - but there's no way I want to buy a box that requires switching settings (that are in a menu system no less) every time you go from a WS to a non-WS channel.


Thanks in advance!

Um, I'll take a punt and say none. Topfield SD PVRs have some user utilities that will do this but that used their own logic (not AFD)

Best you can do I believe is find a unit with a button on the remote.

Otherwise, all FTA TV is broadcast 16:9 with 4:3 content having black bars added down the side. If you just leave your TV in that mode you won't need to change any ratios. Its only if you try zoom 4:3 content up to full screen that you need to jump around?

Regards

Peter Gillespie

PS Leaving aside STB availability, its very (very) unlikely the Oz broadcasters are supplying this information in the DTV stream anyway.

IIRC SC10 has AFDs to control their remote decoders where an area's analogue service is derived from the SD digital service at the transmitter site. WIN had something going on too, but in classic WIN style it was broken, everything was flagged as 4:3 centrecut. That caused issues for a few PDPs - Hitachi was one of them.

yep, was very common for owners of TEAC ITV-D500's in regional areas to have problems with aspect ratio's on SC10.

Personally, I think everything should be broadcast without black bars, i.e. if it's 16:9, send it that way and anyone with 16:9 tv's will get perfect 16:9, people with 4:3 tv's will automatically letterbox at the sign of 16:9 (if consumer chose 4:3 letterbox), if it's 4:3, broadcast it that way, people who have their tuner set to 16:9 will automatically pillarbox it, people with 4:3 tv's will get 4:3 without bars regardless of 4:3 settings.

Good theory, but practically will fail on most Widescreen sets made these days, as not many can understand "WSS" flags, so will be "fatovision" on 16:9 sets. And it would have to rely on the broadcasters flicking the flags on & off actively for different content. When the broadcasters can't even get some basic stuff right, would they do this right?
Regards

So in other words, both the STB manufacturers and the broadcasters are a complete shambles when it comes to basic standards compliance? Wow, that's really pathetic!

Surely there are high-end STBs that can detect the aspect ratio of the signal being received (including whether or not it has black-bars added), right? This is technically possible without needing AFD or other such standards - you could make the processor chip actually work it from the raw image data. How about HD STBs?

Am I the only person in the world that has wanted this feature? I'm somewhat bemused!

yep they're called widescreen tvs with inbuilt tuners...

They market has moved on from SD boxes and no development or upgrades are pretty much happening for them.. Even HD models, the models are changing so fast it's sometimes easier for a manufacturer to replace a box with a new model than to fix a bug.

??? 90% of STBs will detect the aspect flag and work with it accordingly, so for 16:9 (which is 99.999999% of DTV sent in Australia) the STB will letterbox for 4:3 TV sets, and will send WSS flags according to being 16:9 or 4:3 letterbox/centre cut, no difference to what happens with internal tuners. To suggest a STB sample the MPEG frame and look for black bits is a bit crazy really, can easily have false positives doing it this way. DTV is broadcast in 16:9 here. D44 (test junk from Sydney) is about the only broadcast with a few 4:3 channels (EXPO, Aussie Christian Channel).
Regards

The past STB I had would send out a 4:3 signal with letterboxing on all 4 sides when it was set to 4:3 Letterbox and a 4:3 show was on. How can I avoid this? If all channels broadcast 16:9 all the time, doesn't that mean that the system (in other words, the broadcasters) is kind of broken for people with 4:3 TVs?

???

Having seen the fun and games that happen with 7 QLD and the ever so slightly inaccurate timing of their 4:3/16:9 internal switching I can only recoil in horror at trying to get viewers STB to do it properly.

For WIN analogue viewers (where the area has digital too) 'analogue' viewers get to see a permanently 14:9 version of the 16:9 programs - or at least they did, last time I watched WIN. More bizzarely, when WIN first started going digital, it was the other way round! Digital viewers got to see postage stamp vision.

Apologies if I mispoke, but I interpreted the OP as requesting that as he sits on the sofa watching TV the image will be somehow resized for him as different aspect content appears. In practice no STB does this? Digital TV is basically sent out in Oz 'flagged' as 16:9. If necessary the network will add black bars down each side to make a 4:3 show 16:9.

Regards

Peter Gillespie

Yeah that's pretty much what I'm after. Say a 4:3 show is on, the TV shows it in 4:3. Then a 16:9 show comes on, and the TV flicks into letterbox mode. It looks like I'm boned unless I get a WS TV or a TV that is smart enough to do some very intelligent auto-detecting of the aspect-ratio (including super-imposed black bars), which probably doesn't exist either.

So does everyone with a 4:3 TV leave their STB on "4:3 Full"? Having a setup that requires adjusting settings at certain times on certain channels is a real PITA when you live with non-tech people. They tend to complain about how hard it is to "just watch TV"!

Do all you people have WS TVs anyway? Is that why this isn't a bigger deal?

It has been a big enough deal since digital was spec'd for Australia. I thought it would have been a better option for the broadcaster to send 4:3 material as 4:3, and 16:9 material as 16:9, but the govt/etc said "16:9 always" and thus the broadcaster converts 4:3 to 16:9 by adding black bars on the left & right (pillarboxing) and thus the broadcast is a true 16:9 image and you won't get any flags to tell you otherwise. I suppose the issue with toggling between 4:3 and 16:9 is that some STB wouldn't send the correct WSS in the output stream, and some TVs wouldn't recognise the WSS from the STB (*many* TVs don't recognise the aspect signal) and thus a bigger mess than just sending 16:9 always. And this has nothing to do with a STB vs internal tuner, exactly the same issue impacts either setup.

Most Topfield owners with 4:3 sets will use the "0 key" aspect toggle on a reasonably regular basis. There is a TAP available for the Topfield to get rid of the unused aspect ratio, so for 4:3 tv owners it ditched the 16:9 option (so you were only toggling between letterbox and centre cut), and for 4:3 TVs that understand the WSS and will do a vertical compression to letterbox (and thus maintain full resolution unlike the STB letterboxing process) would swap between 16:9 and 4:3 Centre Cut.
An auto letterbox TAP was also created that sampled the frame and made a judgment call about whether the sides were black enough to constitute "pillarboxing" and do the switch automatically, but every time it scanned the frame you would get an audio glitch and you would get a lot of false positives in black/dark scenes, so the author of the TAP made the default option to be to only check the channel a few seconds after you channel surf to that channel, but not check again to avoid the disruption to viewing that regularly checking caused.
Regards