station is in 480i HD?

[Mr Tony]

Oddball question because I normally do not see a situation like this

KEYC-DT2 is the Fox subchannel on CBS. When I check on my Panasonic HDTV it shows CBS at 1080i HD. When I switch to Fox it shows 480i so the channel is in SD.

Here is where it gets weird. Most of the time it has the black bars on the side. Since its 480i my HDTV wont allow me to stretch the screen to get rid of the black bars. I can only do "just" which removes some of the black bars, zoom which is too much, and full which is default. (if its 720 or 1080 I can do "HD just" which removes the black bars)...When Primetime hits though, the screen is full as shown by the pics below from "cops" tonight (the black on top and bottom is the TV itself..the program fills the screen

So what is this considered? 480i downconverted widescreen HD? 480i HD?

My local Fox (KMSP 9 Minneapolis) their SD channel has the black bars for everything (including primetime) except for news. I guess so cable companies can zoom the pic how they feel (satellite gets it form the HD feed)

 

[cditty]

I have a cw subchannel here that is widescreen. Caught me off guard too.

 

[Mr Tony]

ok so I figured it was considered widescreen

Here in Minneapolis the only channel with a REAL subchannel is PBS

CBS has none (O&O)
ABC has 24/7 reruns of news
NBC has a weather thing
My, Fox & CW have SD counterparts

PBS has 4 stations and 3 are in SD only (main is HD)

so this was new to me

 

[jscud]

The PBS in my area, WENH 11, broadcasts 11.1 in 1080i , subchannel 11.2 in 480i and subchannel 11.3 in 16:9 480i. My Dish receiver displays 11.3 with no problem, but my Sony LCD wants to show it in 4:3. I have to use the Sony's Zoom format to widen the picture. The station engineer explained that 16:9 480i is still new and some sets have a problem displaying it.

 

[cditty]

I am actually glad they do the wide 480i. I like it much better than stretching or zooming. I don't really notice any loss in quality from 480i 4:3.

This got me wondering what a 720p subchannel with extreme bitrate reduction to fit in the space would look like... I guess they don't do that since the encoders share the bandwidth pool dynamically based on the content on each channel.

The only channel in my market with a sub (outside of the 2 PBS stations which have 3 subchannels each... I don't count PBS, because I don't watch it) is the CBS/CW combo. My NBC has a weather radar subchannel, so I guess that counts, although it uses very little bandwidth.

 

[QCK]

This got me wondering what a 720p subchannel with extreme bitrate reduction to fit in the space would look like...

It would look more like 480p.