MeTV widescreen foulup

Dee_Ann

Angry consumer!
Original poster
May 23, 2009
3,420
289
Texas
OMG. What the hell are they thinking over at MeTV ??

This morning I tried to watch an episode of Family Affair but it was in full blown 16x9 S-T-R-E-C-H--O--V-I-S-I-O-N !

HORRIBLE! They zoomed and stretched the video to fill the entire 16x9 screen, there were no black bars on the side at all. Everyone's head was chopped off and everyone's face was so zoomed in they were popping out of the screen like a bad 3D movie.

Other shows are not as severely distorted but are still horrible to watch. EVERYTHING MeTV airs was filmed in 4:3 and was meant to be seen that way. Displaying it any other way is an abomination and an insult to the creators of that original content. It's horribly distracting and extremely annoying. When they zoom in content is lost. Who in the world would ever think this is a good idea?

KBMT 12.4 is now transmitting an actual 1280x720 picture but they leave the content distortion to MeTV.
KFDM 6.3 (GRIT) is transmitting a 704x480 but in 16:9 format. KFDM themselves are the ones that are mangling the video and in my opinion, what they are doing is a far greater crime than what MeTV is doing.

Is this where we are going? S-T-R-E-C-H--O--V-I-S-I-O-N ?? Are there that many whiny babies about black bars on their screens that everyone else has to suffer?? I would rather have black bars on screen and see the content in it's original format than some adulterated, mangled up garbage. I suspect it's the whiny little millennials bunch, the same ones that think it's a good idea to have a TV that WATCHES YOU and LISTENS to your home 24/7 and uploads everything it sees and hears to Korea. "Oh, it's too much work to push buttons on my remote, I want to give voice commands to my TV. I want to wave my arms at the TV to change channels." (But pressing buttons is more work than waving your arms?)

I suspect within a few years MeTV will stretch ALL content to 16:9 and to hell with black bars.

It's time for me to start buying up my old favorites on Blu-ray and just quit watching TV. I despise commercials anyway. And all the logos and watermarks and promotional animations.

The world is going to hell in a walmart hand basket and that's as good as it gets, that's where it belongs.
Oh yeah, and GET OFF MY LAWN !!

Disclaimer: Today's rant has been brought to you by Too Much Coffee ?
 
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Dee, I get Metv locally, and it's NOT 16x9 format. It's still good old 4x3, and looks fine.

Perhaps YOUR local station has it set wrong. I've had two different stations up here broadcast Grit and Comet tv at the wrong ratio. I contacted their engineers, pointed out they were wrong, and they corrected them.
 
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OMG. What the hell are they thinking over at MeTV ??

This morning I tried to watch an episode of Family Affair but it was in full blown 16x9 S-T-R-E-C-H--O--V-I-S-I-O-N !

HORRIBLE! They zoomed and stretched the video to fill the entire 16x9 screen, there were no black bars on the side at all. Everyone's head was chopped off and everyone's face was so zoomed in they were popping out of the screen like a bad 3D movie.

Other shows are not as severely distorted but are still horrible to watch. EVERYTHING MeTV airs was filmed in 4:3 and was meant to be seen that way. Displaying it any other way is an abomination and an insult to the creators of that original content. It's horribly distracting and extremely annoying. When they zoom in content is lost. Who in the world would ever think this is a good idea?

KBMT 12.4 is now transmitting an actual 1280x720 picture but they leave the content distortion to MeTV.
KFDM 6.3 (GRIT) is transmitting a 704x480 but in 16:9 format. KFDM themselves are the ones that are mangling the video and in my opinion, what they are doing is a far greater crime than what MeTV is doing.

Is this where we are going? S-T-R-E-C-H--O--V-I-S-I-O-N ?? Are there that many whiny babies about black bars on their screens that everyone else has to suffer?? I would rather have black bars on screen and see the content in it's original format than some adulterated, mangled up garbage. I suspect it's the whiny little millennials bunch, the same ones that think it's a good idea to have a TV that WATCHES YOU and LISTENS to your home 24/7 and uploads everything it sees and hears to Korea. "Oh, it's too much work to push buttons on my remote, I want to give voice commands to my TV. I want to wave my arms at the TV to change channels." (But pressing buttons is more work than waving your arms?)

I suspect within a few years MeTV will stretch ALL content to 16:9 and to hell with black bars.

It's time for me to start buying up my old favorites on Blu-ray and just quit watching TV. I despise commercials anyway. And all the logos and watermarks and promotional animations.

The world is going to hell in a walmart hand basket and that's as good as it gets, that's where it belongs.
Oh yeah, and GET OFF MY LAWN !!

Disclaimer: Today's rant has been brought to you by Too Much Coffee ?

Wow, just checked and got the same here in the LA market.

MeTV is transmitted OTA on local KDOC 56-3 and currently watching Gilligan's Island and it's all zoomed in on as well to fill out a 16:9 frame.

Terrible looking ...

However, watching MeTV from KVME TV 20 in Bishop, CA. carried by DIRECTV and all is fine. It's an SD channel in the normal 4:3 format it's always in.

Sent from my LGMS550 using Tapatalk
 
In the Chattanooga Tennessee market, strange happenings for METV. The screen is almost filled, but just a sliver is black on either side. Also the METV logo and channel ID underneath is all smaller. Change took place a month or so ago. Looks identical on cable and OTA.
THIS tv is stretched on cable but not OTA. Both now owned by Sinclair
 
In the Chattanooga Tennessee market, strange happenings for METV. The screen is almost filled, but just a sliver is black on either side. Also the METV logo and channel ID underneath is all smaller. Change took place a month or so ago. Looks identical on cable and OTA.
THIS tv is stretched on cable but not OTA. Both now owned by Sinclair
Yeah ....

After some initial screw-ups that's the way the format is now here in the LA Market for MeTV both OTA from KDOC 56-3, and KVME 20-1 from Bishop, CA. which is carried by DIRECTV as one of my Ku band spotbeam SD MPEG-2 locals. While most of the commercials and promos are fully in 16:9, yes I feel like I'm watching the European 1.5:1 film format for the actual programming now, lol.

I can live with this now, though the only annoying thing is that both feeds are in anamorphic SD ("squish-o-vision") and have to switch the format settings back and forth when changing channels between other 4:3 SD channels to prevent "stretch-o-vision."

Sent from my LGMS550 using Tapatalk
 
Nobody needs to put up with this because of station incompetence. It's BS, and they need to pay more attention.

Google the station, find out the email address of the engineer (or baring that, send to any email addy you can find for them) Explain that they have the wrong broadcast 'Aspect ratio', and ask nicely for them to change it.

I've done this now to 3 stations total local to me (one was a PSIP issue, other 2 were aspect ratio problems). The only station that ignored me for a couple months, didn't ignore when I then contacted Comet directly, and asked them to get involved. Once they did, it that one was fixed inside of 3 hours!
 
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OMG. What the hell are they thinking over at MeTV ??

This morning I tried to watch an episode of Family Affair but it was in full blown 16x9 S-T-R-E-C-H--O--V-I-S-I-O-N !

HORRIBLE! They zoomed and stretched the video to fill the entire 16x9 screen, there were no black bars on the side at all. Everyone's head was chopped off and everyone's face was so zoomed in they were popping out of the screen like a bad 3D movie.

Other shows are not as severely distorted but are still horrible to watch. EVERYTHING MeTV airs was filmed in 4:3 and was meant to be seen that way. Displaying it any other way is an abomination and an insult to the creators of that original content. It's horribly distracting and extremely annoying. When they zoom in content is lost. Who in the world would ever think this is a good idea?

KBMT 12.4 is now transmitting an actual 1280x720 picture but they leave the content distortion to MeTV.
KFDM 6.3 (GRIT) is transmitting a 704x480 but in 16:9 format. KFDM themselves are the ones that are mangling the video and in my opinion, what they are doing is a far greater crime than what MeTV is doing.

Is this where we are going? S-T-R-E-C-H--O--V-I-S-I-O-N ?? Are there that many whiny babies about black bars on their screens that everyone else has to suffer?? I would rather have black bars on screen and see the content in it's original format than some adulterated, mangled up garbage. I suspect it's the whiny little millennials bunch, the same ones that think it's a good idea to have a TV that WATCHES YOU and LISTENS to your home 24/7 and uploads everything it sees and hears to Korea. "Oh, it's too much work to push buttons on my remote, I want to give voice commands to my TV. I want to wave my arms at the TV to change channels." (But pressing buttons is more work than waving your arms?)

I suspect within a few years MeTV will stretch ALL content to 16:9 and to hell with black bars.

It's time for me to start buying up my old favorites on Blu-ray and just quit watching TV. I despise commercials anyway. And all the logos and watermarks and promotional animations.

The world is going to hell in a walmart hand basket and that's as good as it gets, that's where it belongs.
Oh yeah, and GET OFF MY LAWN !!

Disclaimer: Today's rant has been brought to you by Too Much Coffee ?
On Sling TV, and yes I know this is OTA forum, but my point is on Sling TV TVLAND is HD and shows like Andy Griffith and Gunsmoke and Bonanza, anything not filmed in HD, I'd 4:3. The way it was intended. On cable, TVLAND is in sd, and stretched and poor picture quality. Typical of cable
 
Nobody needs to put up with this because of station incompetence. It's BS, and they need to pay more attention.

Google the station, find out the email address of the engineer (or baring that, send to any email addy you can find for them) Explain that they have the wrong broadcast 'Aspect ratio', and ask nicely for them to change it.

I've done this now to 3 stations total local to me (one was a PSIP issue, other 2 were aspect ratio problems). The only station that ignored me for a couple months, didn't ignore when I then contacted Comet directly, and asked them to get involved. Once they did, it that one was fixed inside of 3 hours!
Might call KDOC to see if they'll correct the anamorphic SD to widescreen (or 16:9) SD. They finally did this for Comet TV which is on their 56-4 when I complained about it several months ago.

But it would be a total waste of time trying to get DIRECTV to send widescreen SD. They just virtually never do more than 4:3 on any of their SD feeds, whether it's their Ku/MPEG-2 or Ka/MPEG-4 ones.

Sent from my LGMS550 using Tapatalk
 
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