How to make 4:3 stretch to 16:9?

[willywonkaisrsh]

Wanted to know if there is a way to make 4:3 shows with letterbox on both sides stretched to fit the whole screen (16:9)? I have an Hr-22 and under settings in the HDTV options there is a setting were you can set to stretch, crop, pillar box, or normal. I set it to stretch but it did not do anything.

 

[Bob Nielsen]

Stretch will do that for 4:3 SD channels (with a distorted picture, of course). If it is a HD (16:9) channel which adds its own pillar box when broadcasting 4:3 content, there is no way for the DVR to stretch it, since the pillars are included in the received signal.

 

[willywonkaisrsh]

Thanks!

I kind of thought that was the reason. I knew the picture would be distorted if it was stretched, but still wanted to know if I could do it.

Thanks for the info.

 

[raoul5788]

I kind of thought that was the reason. I knew the picture would be distorted if it was stretched, but still wanted to know if I could do it.

Thanks for the info.

I guess the real question is why you would do it. Unless you are watching nothing but 4:3 material, and you have an older plasma that is susceptible to burn in, there is no compelling reason to stretch 4:3 to 16:9, IMHO. In fact, I avoid those channels that do this on their own, like TNT.

 

[Ira Lacher]

If you are talking about stretching an SD letterboxed formatted broadcast, I have found that viewing it in Crop mode gives you virtually the entire picture without the stretch distortion. Did this recently when AMC showed Exodus in letterbox format and it looked great!

 

[Jimbo]

If you are talking about stretching an SD letterboxed formatted broadcast, I have found that viewing it in Crop mode gives you virtually the entire picture without the stretch distortion. Did this recently when AMC showed Exodus in letterbox format and it looked great!

In "Crop" mode, it should look good, but you lose a portion of the picture that way...
If you don't mind missing part of the picture, this will work fine for you.