Watching a 4:3 show on a widescreen TV

I watch them the same as you. And I agree ‘you?ve paid for all that extra screen, so why not fill it’ is rubbish for 4:3. What’s the point filling the screen if people get stretched out and distorted.

Luckily my telly is pretty good at adjusting automatically depending on what ration is coming through. It does seem to depend on the channel though. I.e. it’s a bit irritating where you end up with a letter box in the middle of your widescreen telly rather than making use of the whole screen. And setting it to 16:9 doesn’t work in that context either, it just squidges up the picture. (i.e. it’s a letterbox in a 4:3 format… if that makes sense.)

Dear Phil,

Your friend is a twat.

Love and hugs,

Pete

Pillar box aversion is a horrible thing, but it?s dwarfed in comparison to the abomination that is pan and scan. A friend of mine REFUSES to display 16:9 on his 4:3 telly so he chops off the sides. Death is too good for him.

There’s not even any panning going on there!

What I find odd is that so many perfectly intelligent people just CAN’T see the problem with stretch-o-vision. Whereas to me, it’s just… so obvious how horrendous it is. I don’t really mind that people have a blind spot to it… but getting annoyed at pillarboxed pictures *does* push it into the tremendously irritating. If you don’t care enough to notice the stretched picture, how the fuck do you care enough about the black at the sides?

One channel I’ve worked on recently (and I’ve NEVER said where I work online, so I can’t get into trouble on this one!) broadcasts widescreen films without the widescreen flag set – so widescreen TVs just broadcast it in 4:3. So, you hit the widescreen button on your TV to flip it to 16:9 – and realise that the DOG is broadcast in 4:3. So you can either have the DOG in the right aspect ratio and the picture squashed, or the picture fine but have a horrendous stretched DOG which is really fucking irritating.

And that’s to say nothing about their trailers, which freely mix true widescreen clips with stretch-o-vision…

Even a lot of people in television seem to have this blind spot, and don’t care about the issue at all. And there’s NO excuse there.

I can’t understand why anyone would be content to watch in the wrong ratio.
Are they just too lazy to press a button to change it? What’s so difficult about watching 4:3 in 4:3, and 16:9 in 16:9, anyway?

Pet hate: people who have to have every millimetre of the screen filled whatever the ratio so that you end up watching foreign films with half the subtitles chopped off.

I prefer stretchy vision. Makes me feel better to see other fat people. I don’t seem so fat then!

Many American networks have three stations now – one for 4:3 (which invariably shows letterbox’d content), one for 16:9, and one for HD which will usually pillar 4:3 content automatically.

Guess which versions of these networks my Dad and Stepmom almost uniformly choose to watch on our lovely widescreen HD tellybox.

> I?m laughing at the thought of someone choosing to watch Lost

Me too.

Except it wouldn’t be in 4:3. It’d be letterboxed. And also stretched because it’s being broadcast lettereboxed in 4:3 and watched on a widescreen TV.

Lost is rubbish. Nobody has any idea where it’s going or how it ends. That includes the writers.

I wish I’d seen the pitch meeting for that show.

“Right, what it’s about, right, a plane crashes on this island, yeah? And then they, like, sort of live on the island, and shit.”
“That’s… that’s basically ‘Gilligan’s Island’.”
“Is it?”
“Yeah. I mean, is this a comedy, or what?”
“No.”
“So it’s ‘Gilligan’s Island’, but without any jokes in.”
“Well… well no, because it’ll… have… there’ll be… a smoke monster.”
“A smoke monster.”
“Yes. And a polar bear.”
“A polar b–? You’re, you’re just scrabbling for ideas now.”
“No I’m not. And the survivors will find… a hole.”
“A hole.”
“Yes.”
“A hole in the island.”
“Well not in the island, per se.”
“I have to say, this sounds absolutely rubbish.”
“It does, yes.”
“Awful. Simply awful. No one’s going to watch it.”
“No, they’re not. I’m sorry.”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“…”
“What’s going to be in the hole?”

> One reason why people were pissed off with Lost is that they didn?t want it to be a long series…Those with brains could stick with it.

Yeah, it’s absolutely this simple. Cos I hate ambition and long-plan series, and don’t possess the intellect to comprehend any other form of TV. That goodness you got to the bottom of that one.

> I hope they KILL Kate for just being crap

I’ve been hoping this since season 2

> One reason why people were pissed off with Lost is that they didn?t want it to be a long series

I think the main reason is that people have such a short attention span and they want the payoff NOW, not 2, 3 or 5 years down the line.
And Lost (with a couple of exceptions) doesn’t feel the need to spell out every single plot point and make it blindingly obvious. It rewards you actually paying attention to the plot – quite contrary to the tendency these days to spoon feed people rather than try to allow them to figure things out for themselves.,

Personally I think Lost is one of the best shows I’ve seen for …. oooh, I don’t know how long. I’ll admit it has lost it’s way at times, notably seasons 3 and 4 went seriously awry at points, but now that we’re drawing towards the final season you can see that it’s carefully plotted and drawing towards a clear conclusion.

Lost’s biggest failing is that it’s completely inaccessible to a casual viewer. I mean, either you watch it or you don’t. To someone who hasn’t been watching it since day one it must seem like complete gibberish.

quite apart from the fact that “The Constant” was in season 4

> Just wait till Cappsy gets here?

I’m staying quiet. Except…

> Season 3 (with the best ever episode still being ?The Constant?).

The Constant was in season 4.

Oh yeah!

Ok, so while I’m here I’d like to say that Ben is talking bullshit.

> (Quoting White Hole from Series Three there)

You must be confused, White Hole wasn’t an episode of Lost.

> Yeah, it?s absolutely this simple. Cos I hate ambition and long-plan series, and don?t possess the intellect to comprehend any other form of TV.

It’s good of you to admit that.

The Constant is indeed an amazing episode, possibly the best ever. The Variable was pretty crap in comparison. What I didn’t like about it was how stupid they made Faraday look, suddenly thinking ‘oh yeah, we MIGHT be able to change things’. Not to mention him walking into the Others’ camp shooting like that, what did he expect was going to happen?

I hope everyone is ready for the alternate reality season. Hopefully we’ll see Richard Alpert’s story, Ben getting some kind of redemption, Widmore getting his fucking comeuppance, Jack getting a good ending with purpose, Sawyer going out in a blaze of glory etc.

I think it’s worth noting that the polar bears and the hatch have both been explained…

Oh, and I *hate* stretchyvision so much! But what annoys me more is when the analogue signal “compromises” with 16:9 shows by broadcasting them in 14:9, with a thin sliver shaved off each side and with small black bars on the top & bottom. Thing is, my widescreen TV has 3 settings — 16:9, 4:3 and Zoom — so if I’ve recorded something on the VCR I can either watch it with pillarboxes and small letterboxes, or zoomed in with a sliver shaved off the top and bottom as well. Then again, last week we got a digital recorder so it’s not so much of a problem any more.

> But what annoys me more is when the analogue signal ?compromises? with 16:9 shows by broadcasting them in 14:9, with a thin sliver shaved off each side and with small black bars on the top & bottom. Thing is, my widescreen TV has 3 settings ? 16:9, 4:3 and Zoom ? so if I?ve recorded something on the VCR I can either watch it with pillarboxes and small letterboxes, or zoomed in with a sliver shaved off the top and bottom as well. Then again, last week we got a digital recorder so it?s not so much of a problem any more.

I think broadcasting 14:9 on analogue is a good compromise – doesn’t annoy the old dears who wonder why their screens aren’t being filled. :) However, our widescreen TV (a CRT) does have a 14:9 setting, but it’s not available when playing back a video recording from our DVD+R recorder (no PVR just yet!), in which case I encounter the same problem as you. And you can only view Teletext in either 4:3 or 16:9, not 14:9 (not that that’ll be an issue much longer… sadly).

For some reason our TV also has separate “wide” and “16:9” settings, which seem to produce identical effects.

Anyway, I thought Lost was pretty crap in Season 2 where they introduced a ton of characters and systematically killed them all off. But then it turned things totally around in Season 3 (with the best ever episode still being ?The Constant?). They clearly didn?t have a plan from day one but they just as clearly do now.

This. I’ll admit to being one of the people who disliked it – and believed, and still do, that there wasn’t a complete plan at that point – at the start, but it has got a hell of a lot better – and they clearly know EXACTLY where they’re going with it, and have done since season three. It’s stopped being a mystery about some impossibly pretty people in a jungle, and started being a headfuck time-travel drama about a load of weirdos and geeks. What’s not to like?

> The point at which the show became good was when all the questions stopped being about what had ALREADY happened, and instead became about what was GOING to happen.

Right. They realised they couldn’t just keep stringing people along with the original mysteries like ‘what’s the smoke monster?’ ‘why did the plane crash?’ etc. they had to get a few answers out of the way so they could move on. They may have only been partial answers but it was enough for viewers to put the big questions to the back of their mind and concentrate on enjoying the drama.

A big copout conclusion of them beind dead or dreaming would be unforgivable and Lindelof and Cuse know it, they have said the ending isn’t like that.

My parents have just bought a widescreen TV, which is hooked up to a hard disk recorder thing with a built-in DVD player. The only two DVDs I’ve watched on it were Torchwood’s Children Of Earth which looked amazing and Mawdryn Undead which looked like shit, pixelly and flat, I have yet to watch it again on my own less impressive set-up.

I have read lots of comments that specifically say that it is; granted a lot of them were from reviews and press as opposed to normal people, but I’ve never seen anything else branded as such so many times. Anyway I actually thought it got better as it went on as I didn’t think much of the mini series or a lot of the first season. Generally also I thought the pace of it was far too fast, particularly when Starbuck goes to look for that arrow and they make a big deal about it, then she’s back like two episodes later. In fact I thought the pacing throughout wasn’t very good and there was only time to breath in the last part of season 4, and even that picked up again towards the end. The finale itself was okay I suppose, although they spent too long on new Earth and then the final thing was ridiculous, even though I liked the idea that it was all set in the past.

I’ll give the series consistency, although like I say I thought it was massively over-hyped.

I’m interested though, how many characters did you (or anyone else) really care for throughout the series? If it was more than four I’d be surprised.