I can't recall seeing an instance where an HD broadcaster stretched a 4:3 picture to fill the entire frame from side to side and top to bottom instead of padding the sides with black bars.Ĥ:3 SD channels may pad widescreen content with black bars at the top and bottom to fill a 4:3 frame or they can use something called anamorphic widescreen, where a 16:9 picture is squeezed horizontally to fill a 4:3 frame.

If you see black bars, they were deliberately added by the broadcaster as padding to create a picture in the resolution used by that channel. For one thing, they are uniformly 16:9 aspect ratio. There are fewer display issues with HD channels. You would need to look at a recording using a video editor to find out whether or not they are part of the picture as broadcast, and maybe also use MediaInfo on the file containing the recording to find out the aspect ratio and video resolution used for the broadcast. The black bars may be added by the HW180STB for output over HDMI or they may be present in the broadcast. They definitely don't do the job as well as most TVs do when the TV is directly displaying an OTA broadcast. NTSC, ATSC, 8-VSB, CLEAR-QAM The picture formatting performed by the HW180STB (or any other set-top box) for display over HDMI often complicates matters. In addition, when the image is only in the center, the people look too tall and narrow, as if the image is squished into the center.

So does this mean the TV ALWAYS automatically stretches the image to fit the entire 16:9 widescreen, but the HW180STB does not?

The odd thing is that it never ever shows space on the sides normally, when NOT getting it's video image from the HW180STB. Great if you want fatter faces and bodies etc. Many, especially younger people, who have grown up only with wide-screen tvs, can not handle this and seek to stretch that image to fill the screen. The other thing is that the correct way to view a 4:3 transmission/recording is to have the picture centered with black bars left and right.

Mediasonic hw180stb converter box setup