Autodetecting 4:3 zoom aspect ratio for MythTV

Posted on March 3rd, 2008 by

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I recently bought myself a nice LCD TV, which of course has a 16:9 aspect ratio. My signal is still analog SD and so I find myself constantly changing the aspect ratio manually of the show I am watching.

Typically the reason is that a 16:9 movie is actually send out with black bars on the top and bottom. The result is that I’m only using half the real estate of my TV because I have black bars on all four sides. It is what is known as “windowboxed” and you can see it here:

In MythTV, this can be fixed by using the “4:3 Zoom” aspect ratio, but it is quite annoying to have to do this manually all the time (and my wife will never understand it…)

But now it looks like there is a solution underway. Currently there is a patch available which tries to solve this problem by autodetecting this and automatically switches to the right aspect mode.

You have to apply the patch yourself. You can find it and the discussion about it here.

Filed under: MythTV

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5 Responses to “Autodetecting 4:3 zoom aspect ratio for MythTV”

  1. Jake, on March 3rd, 2008 at 4:32 pm Said:

    That does look kinda cool. I have my “*” key reprogrammed to change zoom aspect ratios and almost always have to hit it twice (from default of off to 4:3 (in reality, no change) then from 4:3 to 16:9. If all the stuff could be auto-detected, that’d be awesome!

  2. Smart Home Blog » Autodetecting 4:3 aspect ratio in MythTV, on March 4th, 2008 at 5:31 am Said:

    […] [via MythTV News] […]

  3. ???? ?????? ???? » ?????????????? ??????????? ??????? 4:3 ? MythTV, on March 6th, 2008 at 1:05 pm Said:

    […] [????????: MytTV News] […]

  4. butexcuseme, on March 6th, 2008 at 9:46 pm Said:

    Setting the aspect to “fill” works perfectly for me on my 16:9 LCD-tv, using mythtv 0.20.2. Zooms and crops exactly as you want, fully automatic.

  5. Kobski, on March 6th, 2008 at 11:42 pm Said:

    Hmmm, I just tried it and it doesn’t work for me. When I try it all my real 4:3 content gets zoomed so that the top and the bottom is cut off.
    I have my recording profile set at 4:3, if that makes any difference…

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