The Widescreen issue...

JasonWilliams · 21-04-2005, 13:23

I've been on Telewest for years and have been happy with their service except for now and then the Widescreen broadcasting channels seem to "hiccup" and go back to 4:3 and stretch, I have a small video clip somewhere to demonstrate what I mean.

I had an engineer out who didn't really know what to do, he put something extra on the back of the cable box and that was it ..... but it still happens.

Anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks,

Jason

Millay · 21-04-2005, 14:24

Hi and

to the site.

Could this be your TV itself by any chance, some telies have automatic screen adjustment, where they try and guess the best picture format, I know this can cause problems.

Ths is also quite a comon thing when channels go to ad breaks etc...

JasonWilliams · 21-04-2005, 17:44

Thanks, found this via the vbulletin.org site!

It's neither I'm afraid, it was mid-show and it's definately not the TV as I have got it as an MPEG I took from a DVD I recorded it on.

Here's the clip to demonstrate what I mean:

http://www.steadiforum.com/wide.mpg

I did show the TW tech this, but he couldn't think of anything to hand, but nothing has ever come of this, but the problem still exists.

Tristan · 21-04-2005, 19:02

Just out of curiousity, what set-top box have you got?

There is a longstanding history of Pace 1000 and 2000 boxes doing this. Aparently what happens is that the video decoder crashes, and is restarted immediately by the OS. When it does this, it doesn't reapply the user settings, and defaults to 4:3 CCO mode.

With luck it will be sorted in the next Telewest software release. In the mean time, a solution is to do something that causes the settings to be reapplied -- either rebooting, or using interactive should do this. It may even be enough just to bring up the home screen on Telewest, I'm not sure.

Welcome to the site, by the way

Jonboy · 21-04-2005, 19:23

my pace box does it all the time the tv eng said its ntl the way the signal was transmitted or something like that ntl say its my tv all i know is it never done it untill the last round of software updates my box constantly freezes as well if i could afford to change to a better supplier i would but as far as i can make out the others have their problems as well

nn012 · 21-04-2005, 23:21

Quote:

Originally Posted by JasonWilliams

I've been on Telewest for years and have been happy with their service except for now and then the Widescreen broadcasting channels seem to "hiccup" and go back to 4:3 and stretch, I have a small video clip somewhere to demonstrate what I mean.

I had an engineer out who didn't really know what to do, he put something extra on the back of the cable box and that was it ..... but it still happens.

Anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

Thanks,

Jason

Hi, welcome. Yes, this is a known problem with the Pace boxes, apparently the Scientific Atlanta boxes dont suffer from this problem, check this thread out on DigitalSpy http://forum.digitalspy.co.uk/board/...d.php?t=186772
As Tristan says well have to wait for the next code release which should also fix the picture shifting too much to the left. Im reliably told that this code release will happen when VOD is rolled out.

Jonboy · 22-04-2005, 00:33

thnks for that link at least i know its going to get sorted sometime never