Widescreen Broadcasting

[ll_billym]

How is television broadcast at the moment seeing as some TV's are widescreen and some are not?

Is it broadcast in widescreen or 4:3 ?

[jenstar]

Analogue, and 4:3 programmes on digital, are broadcast in 4:3. (14:9 programmes are letterboxed within the 4:3 frame; also many films are now broadcast on analogue as letterboxed 16:9 within a 4:3 picture). 16:9 widescreen programmes are generally broadcast on digital as Full Height Anamorphic pictures, meaning that all the information is compressed into a 4:3 picture. View this on a 4:3 set in its natural format and you'll see the whole picture, but squashed up. The digibox can process this in various ways - it can reformat 16:9 FHA so that it appears as letterboxed 16:9 within a 4:3 frame for 4:3 TVs, or it can crop the 16:9 image by taking the sides off, producing an unsquashed picture (but with bits missing), or just send the signal straight through to the TV in FHA format. It also sends a signal to widescreen TVs to indicate the correct format, which can be overridden by the viewer.

[ll_billym]

Thanks Jenstar, I am glad it wasn't a simple answer.

What is Full Height Anamorphic?

[landie]

I understand that a new development called tall screen will be with us soon, it shows the same width as wide screen but the height gives it an aspect ratio similar to a conventional monitor.

[Narolines]

So isn't a widescreen made taller so that it's in the same proportion as a conventional screen just a bigger conventional screen?

[Tim B]

You can adjust the picture to get any aspect ratio that you want on a modern TV or with a digi box.  If it's widescreen on conventional telly then to preserve the aspect ratio you either have to lose the side edges or reduce the whole picture (width and height) so that you end up with a complete picture but a black band top and bottom.