I recently pulled out an old DVD I’d purchased years ago and popped it into a reasonably old DVD player. It’s interesting how DVDs date themselves with their supported formats. In my case, it opened by asking if I wanted “normal” or “widescreen”, normal, of course, being the now dated 4:3 ratio common for square tube TVs.

If I selected “normal”, things went fairly well. The height filled my widescreen TV’s screen, but I had, of course, black bars or boxes to the left and right so that the ratio was preserved.

If I selected “widescreen”, however, I had black boxes on all sides of the picture. That is, it was a “widescreen” projected into the faux 4:3 screen created in the middle of my widescreen TV for the “normal” ratio. A picture surrounded by black boxes is the worst of all worlds.

Solution? I had to tell my DVD player AND my TV we’re widescreen.

Well, there was an option in my DVD player (well hidden in a menus several rungs deep in an unhelpfully named "custom settings" menu) that allowed me to select an output format that expected a 16:9 ratio widescreen TV. Sounds good, right?

DvdManualWidescreenSettings

No. Not really. What that does without any other change is to output a squooshed 4:3 picture on my TV. What the heck?

Turns out my TV is expecting a 4:3 signal from its A/V ports. When it sees the 16:9 signal, it’s the TV that does the squooshing. You have to have tell the TV that you’re expecting a 16:9 signal from the DVD player, and set that up for your A/V port.

Does this mean if I plug an Atari 2600 into that port now that I’ve got my TV expecting 16:9 on the A/V that the Atari’s ratio would be off without resetting the property in my TV’s settings? I think so, though I haven’t tried.

Why is the picture quality so stinky?

But now the picture quality stinks, like a video taken with a point and shoot camera at the start of the digital era. Parts of faces often looked like they trailed their head’s position, like somebody was doing a strange rubber pencil trick with their eyes and mouths.

What’s going on? Can I fix this?

The quick answer is no, no I can’t. My TV is upconverting the signal, which is a fancy way of saying “taking a low resolution source and putting it onto a high resolution screen”. There aren't enough pixel-equivalents in the older DVD player’s signal to make a good picture, and the TV is using some algorithm to fill things in.

But my TV’s upconverting algorithm stinks.

Note that I said analog

Note that I said that this DVD player is using the A/V ports on my TV.

A/V ports

That’s that three-wire, analog signal. It stinks.

If I had a good DVD player, it would do the upconverting from the DVD, and keep the signal digital from source to screen. That would require, you got it, a digital connection to the TV, like an HDMI cord.

The DVD player I’m using has no upconverter, and the TV is going to have a hard time with a digital-to-analog-to-digital signal that’s already a few generations old. Plus it doesn’t really care about upconverting. It’s an inexpensive TV set. I also get the feeling that it does better upconverting a 4:3 signal, which makes sense. There’s a decent correlation between widescreen content and digitally encoded content.

Make sense?

A real solution would be...

So the real solution is a better DVD player, like my Playstation 3, with its own upconverter, connected to my TV with a digital cable. Unfortunately, I don’t have my PS3 handy. Eventually, I got used to the weird faces.

(To be clear, I was watching Lebowski, but the weird faces reminded me of the effects in Thumb Wars. ;^D)

Useful links related to DVD widescreen:

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