- Apr 23, 2003
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I'm trying to "upgrade" my parents' TV setup so that they can take full advantage of the new HD DirecTV receiver and various other goodies they've recently installed throughout the house. Because they live out in the middle of nowhere (and they live alone) they pretty much rely on a centralized setup, with one DSS receiver and VCR/DVD Recorder combo broadcasting throughout the rest of the house. I've got everything working pretty much perfectly, but there are a few things that could work... better. Unfortunately they either require a nightmare of hackery and jiggery-pokery, or some highly obscure equipment. I'm hoping some of you may know of a few work-arounds, or at least where I can find one-shot solutions.
Here's the deal: currently the house is a "mixed aspect ratio" environment. A number of the rooms are equipped with under-cabinent LCDs (for space-saving reasons) that are 16:9, but unfortunately have no real zoom options. (e.g. crop, letterbox, stretch, etc. like you'd find on a full-sized HDTV) You CAN switch them into 4:3 mode, but whenever you watch something that's being broadcast in 16:9 mode (e.g. most of the stuff on NBC) you effectively get a box around the whole picture. Now if all the TVs in the house were widescreen this would be no big thing at all: just switch the HD receiver and the VCR/DVD recorder into 16:9 A/R; unfortunately most of the TVs are 4:3, but the few 16:9 TVs other than the main HD are so small the "double letterboxing" really kills the visibility. The ideal solution for the current setup would be some kind of re-broadcaster or inline picture editor that would crop a 4:3 image to 16:9, then output it in "squashed" mode. From there I could get it to the specific TVs that would need the 16:9 picture. (Actually, I'd just add another UHF rebroadcaster into the system that used this new "squashed" output) The problem with this is that I have no idea what this would be called, or if it even exists. I imagine it's a fairly trivial thing to create something that can interpret a signal, crop, and resize it, but where would one find such a thing?
Here's the deal: currently the house is a "mixed aspect ratio" environment. A number of the rooms are equipped with under-cabinent LCDs (for space-saving reasons) that are 16:9, but unfortunately have no real zoom options. (e.g. crop, letterbox, stretch, etc. like you'd find on a full-sized HDTV) You CAN switch them into 4:3 mode, but whenever you watch something that's being broadcast in 16:9 mode (e.g. most of the stuff on NBC) you effectively get a box around the whole picture. Now if all the TVs in the house were widescreen this would be no big thing at all: just switch the HD receiver and the VCR/DVD recorder into 16:9 A/R; unfortunately most of the TVs are 4:3, but the few 16:9 TVs other than the main HD are so small the "double letterboxing" really kills the visibility. The ideal solution for the current setup would be some kind of re-broadcaster or inline picture editor that would crop a 4:3 image to 16:9, then output it in "squashed" mode. From there I could get it to the specific TVs that would need the 16:9 picture. (Actually, I'd just add another UHF rebroadcaster into the system that used this new "squashed" output) The problem with this is that I have no idea what this would be called, or if it even exists. I imagine it's a fairly trivial thing to create something that can interpret a signal, crop, and resize it, but where would one find such a thing?
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