Using an xbox one to stream on a new 4 tuner. Some channels do not fill the screen. They look to be in 16:9 rather than 4:3 but there is a good bit of space above and on the sides. Almost like the whole picture is zoomed out. It is not doing on on the “main” channels. Just the auxiliary channels. -2,-3 and so on. Any ideas?
When you look at settings can you see how they are being broadcast? Sounds like maybe some 480 channels…
Not on the Xbox. I actually just plugged the coax directly into my tv and got a full screen on all of these channels. I believe the tv is zooming the picture in to fit the screen and maybe the Tablo is preserving the original aspect ratio???
So I found out that this particular channel is transmitted in 480i. The movie I am watching was originally 2.35:1 format. So why is it coming across as 4:3?
If it matters I am noticing the logo in the bottom right corner of most of these channels is set up a little higher than normal. Maybe they are anticipating the zoom function that most TVs will do. When I plug directly in to the tv it will automatically fill the screen just as the HD channels do.
Is this a setting I am missing? Does the same thing on my iPhone app but I have a zoom button available.
This is what you get when a wide format original is rebroadcast in SD, watched on an HD display. Most TVs can figure out they need to zoom in to eliminate the bars, but the Tablo won’t do that. And now the TV doesn’t see that it’s originally 480i, since the Tablo has transcoded the transmission. Only solution is to manually change the mode on the TV to zoom.
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That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation!
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This Wiki will help explain, the widescreen movie is being “letterboxed” so it can fit a 4:3 broadcast (480i). The result when played back on the Tablo is vertical bars on the left and right because the Tablo is playing back a 4:3 recordings, and then horizontal bars on the top and bottom because of the letterboxing. This results in the zoomed out appearance you described.
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