Squashed & cropped 4:3 on streaming services
#1

Not sure if this is the right place to talk about this, so if not, mods are welcome to do their thing.

I have Fire TV sticks in the house, and I've ruled out ever watching 4:3 content on All4, owing to the fact that the picture was both stretched to 16:9 *and* cropped with pillarbox bars on the screen. I just figured this was down to incompetency on the part of the tech folk uploading the content with the wrong settings. I'd flagged this up to All4 from time to time and got no response. I tried looking online to see if anyone else had similar issues, and the results were very thin on the ground. I know people's pickiness over picture quality varies rapidly, but surely, there can't be this many people who are content having their content distorted *and* cropped?

Anyway, earlier this week, I decide to download the STV Player app to indulge in Brookside. I knew as soon as the adverts started that there would be trouble - the STV Player promo was formatted in 4:3 letterbox, but stretched across to fill a 16:9 image, *and* the dreaded pillarbox bars were cutting off the sides of the already distorted image. I brought this up over on the Brookside thread to see if anyone else had this issue. Unless the post was ignored, I can only gather I'm alone in my experiences once again.

I've just gone to play the most recent episode that's available at the time of posting, and to my delight, the STV Player promo was formatted to 4:3 letterbox, *but* it wasn't stretched! Low and behold, when Brookside started to play, I could see the overscan areas on either side of the picture. Rejoice! STV must've noticed the issue and fixed it. I went to check if they'd fixed the earlier episodes - they hadn't. So I went to see at what point the episodes were fixed... I got up to the episode I'd just played and found to be displaying correctly, and it was suddenly distorted and cropped again!

I can only assume this is something happening to me? I haven't come across any settings on either the STV or All4 apps, nor the system settings on the Fire TV stick, that could be having this affect on 4:3 content. Does anyone have the faintest idea what might be going on? Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.
Reply


Messages In This Thread
Squashed & cropped 4:3 on streaming services - by Larry the Loafer - 12-02-2023, 07:56 PM
RE: Squashed & cropped 4:3 on streaming services - by Neil Jones - 12-02-2023, 09:05 PM
RE: Squashed & cropped 4:3 on streaming services - by Larry the Loafer - 12-02-2023, 11:42 PM
RE: Squashed & cropped 4:3 on streaming services - by Pete - 15-02-2023, 10:51 PM
RE: Squashed & cropped 4:3 on streaming services - by Larry the Loafer - 16-02-2023, 12:29 AM
RE: Squashed & cropped 4:3 on streaming services - by Pete - 19-02-2023, 04:07 PM
RE: Squashed & cropped 4:3 on streaming services - by Neil Jones - 19-02-2023, 11:02 PM

Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)