Aspect ratio problems when playing recorded material on the modern TV

[Kari Rantanen]

Hello, I am a newbie here on this forum but have been using DVBViewer Pro intensively and very successfully more than a year now for both recording and playing back different digital materials. I do not know whether this is the right forum, please advice me. And this is NOT a problem report since I don't see DVBViewer working wrong here. I am just trying to find the explanation and possible solution from a forum of very advanced users of digital media for this kind of situation that many people must have encountered already. I wa astonished not to find any discussions or solutions for it anywhere.

 

So I encounter this problem when playing back recordings made with DVBViewer Pro from the Finnish DVB-T broadcasts. I have made them to a Transpor Stream (TS) format and DVBViewer tells me that the resolution of the received stream (and the playback) are 720 x 576 x 25 fps. These recordings play back excellent with DVBViewer as well as any other player. The aspect ratio is perfectly right on the PC display when 16:9 is selected. Actually DVBViewer also auto-selects this correctly every time. But when I play back these materials on some very modern LCD TV sets (like LG9000 series and Samsung 7000 series) the aspect ratio is not right on the screen. These TV sets don't allow you to set the aspect ratio at all for playback (as they do for live broadcasts) but they just display the materials exactly as they are, pixel by pixel. Hence the 720 x 576 looks too narrow and high on the screen.

 

With my limited knowledge on these formats it looks like a) these digital broadcasts have some special format or information in them in addition to the mere 720 x 576 pixels, the PC video players can use this information to scale the X axis accordingly on playback.

 

Since it looks like many of the most modern TV sets cannot do any scaling or aspect ratio control at all in playback I have to find out whether there's something to be done at the other end of the chain, when recording material? Any advice or ideas?