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Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed?

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On 07/09/2026 21:28, J. P. Gilliver wrote:
> (Or have they stopped bothering?) SD Freeview.
> 
> On my elderly but still functional Panasonic TV (TX-L22X20B), when 4:3
> material was being transmitted - properly, rather than including the
> black bars sometimes with a dog in them - such as the original (and
> sometimes startlingly green due to film fading!) All Creatures Great and
> Small, and assorted other programmes (such as some BBC4 archive music
> programmes), the TV displayed it wrongly - i. e. filling the full width,
> so appearing squashed or stretched - unless I turned the subtitles off.
> (I presume doing subtitles _and_ rendering the picture pillarboxed was
> just too much processing load for whatever processor it contains.) If I
> turned subtitles off, the picture appeared properly pillarboxed.
> 
> But recently, such material is filling the screen whether I turn the
> subtitles off or not; I've noticed it on the Catherine Cookson stuff on
> channel 20 on Sunday afternoons (I _think_ that has changed and used to
> be displayable correctly), and I'm seeing it now on the Mastermind 1977
> being shown on channel 9 (BBC Four) now (Monday 7, 21:00) - i. e. it's
> appearing full-screen, so squashed or stretched, regardless of whether I
> have subtitles on or not.
> 
> Since I very much doubt there has been any OTA firmware "up" (down) date
> of such an old set, have the broadcasters just abandoned setting the
> flag altogether? Seems to apply to both BBC and whoever is responsible
> for channel 20 (U&Drama). (If they have, I'd rather have the broadcast
> include the side black bars - at least the picture would not be distorted.)
> 
> On my bedrrom setup (HD-capable TEKNIKAL set-top box), BBC4 SD on
> channel 9 is also showing the old Mastermind full-screen (stretched); on
> HD (channel 106) it is showing correctly, i. e. pillarboxed. (Toggling
> subtitles makes no difference on either resolution, but I wasn't
> expecting it to on that setup.)

Some channels use the widescreen flag properly: they broadcast 4:3 
archive programmes using the full 720 pixels of width, and set the flag 
to tell the TV "display this in the centre of the screen and do not 
stretch 4:3 to 16:9". Some of the UKTV channels (eg Drama, Yesterday) 
used to do this at every transition between 16:9 adverts and 4:3 programme.

Mainstream channels such as BBC1 and ITV broadcast everything as 16:9, 
so 4:3 programmes occupy the centre of the 16:9 frame and hence only a 
proportion of the 720 pixels are used: the rest is used for the black 
border. This means that the horizontal resolution of the picture is crap 
(to use a technical term!).

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Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2026-09-07 21:28 +0100
  Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? NY <me@privacy.net> - 2026-09-13 21:11 +0100
    Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2026-09-13 22:39 +0100
    Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? Brian Gregory <void-invalid-dead-dontuse@email.invalid> - 2026-09-13 23:39 +0100
      Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2026-09-14 03:12 +0100
        Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? Brian Gregory <void-invalid-dead-dontuse@email.invalid> - 2026-09-18 22:50 +0100
          Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2026-09-19 00:36 +0100
        Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? Brian Gregory <void-invalid-dead-dontuse@email.invalid> - 2026-09-18 22:57 +0100
          Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2026-09-19 00:38 +0100
            Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? Brian Gregory <void-invalid-dead-dontuse@email.invalid> - 2026-09-19 05:03 +0100
              Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2026-09-19 22:01 +0100
    Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? richard@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Richard Tobin) - 2026-09-14 09:55 +0000
      Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? NY <me@privacy.net> - 2026-09-14 14:37 +0100
        Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2026-09-14 19:15 +0100
    Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? wolfgang s <see@sig.nature> - 2026-09-18 09:19 +0000
      Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? NY <me@privacy.net> - 2026-09-18 13:09 +0100
        Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? "J. P. Gilliver" <G6JPG@255soft.uk> - 2026-09-18 22:13 +0100
        Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? Brian Gregory <void-invalid-dead-dontuse@email.invalid> - 2026-09-18 22:42 +0100
        Re: Has the way the 4:3 flag is broadcast been changed? wolfgang s <see@sig.nature> - 2026-09-20 19:03 +0000

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