Please, Correct Your Aspect Ratio

OK, this is driving me nuts. People, attend to your aspect ratios. I’m sick to death of 16:9 (widescreen) videos being scrunched to 4:3 (normal). Though it happens a little less frequently, stretching 4:3 vids to fit 16:9 is just as awful. Two words, people: black bars.

One really neat thing about DVDs that you author is that you don’t have to put in the black bars yourself (usually), the specification allows you to inform the player of the aspect ratio and the player accommodates it on its own. FYI: this gives you better widescreen picture quality, to boot.

I do realize that a lot of people don’t have or understand the video software to easily make these ajustments. Since I do it with free software, I know it’s not about expense. It’s mostly about having to learn this techie stuff when you just don’t have that extra bit of time. That’s fair. What really gets me, though, are professional web content providers and worse, television companies, who still screw up the aspect ratio. Seriously?

4:3 stretched to 16:9

But it’s not just content producers that need a good ruler to the back of the hand, it’s also a lot of you people (most?) who have wide screen TVs and never change their set’s picture size to match what they are viewing. I go over to people’s abodes and can tell that they just put the set on 16:9 and let all the 4:3 programs widen to fit. Gah! My mom…my own mother…tells me that she just doesn’t notice the difference? Not notice the difference? When people look like they are in a fun-house mirror, you can’t tell the difference? When things that should be circles are instead ovals, you can’t tell the difference?

16:9 squeezed to 4:3

sigh Where did I go wrong with her?

There’s this button on most widescreen TV remotes. It will be one of the ones you don’t know what it’s for. The label will be something like PIC or PSIZE or P.SCREEN or something of that nature. You use that to change your screen’s aspect ratio. (On some sets, its buried in a menu…inconsiderate business, that.)

Oh, and while you’re at it, make sure your DVD player is set to show 16:9 movies. You’ve got a widescreen set and your player knows how to deal with it, so let it. How? It’s an old trick engineers and scientists have relied on for many, many decades: RTFM (Read The F-F-F…F-ine Manual).

We are going to be having a mix of 4:3 programs and 16:9 programs for a long time. You might as well hoist yourselves up to the point where you can handle that (ahem) aspect of digital video. In the meantime…you don’t mind if I just make a teensy little adjustment to your set? I didn’t think so.