> What [Accurian and Digital Stream] STBs allow, that the Philips > PVR does not do, is to set each channel and have that setting > stored in memory. The STBs give these options: > > 1. Normal, unstretched video. > 2. Stretch out the video horizontally, to fill the 16:9 screen. > 3. Zoom in, to expand a letterboxed+pillarboxed image to fill 16:9. I take that partially back. In further testing, I discovered that these STBs don't store settings for each station scanned. Rather, they store settings for all programs transmitted as "HD" and all transmitted as "SD." One setting for each. Most stations are consistent in how they use their subchannels. The typical setup is that the -1 subchannel is the HDTV channel, and it requires a horizontal stretch when viewed on a 16:9 monitor. And the -2, -3, etc. subchannels are SDTV, and they do NOT require the horizontal stretch. So far, fine. Most stations, when they transmit SD out of their -1 subchannel, *continue* to require the receiver to stretch the image. That's good in a sense, because it avoids the user having to fuss with receiver settings when the station goes from non-prime-time SD to prime-time HD. So the SD programming will appear as pillarboxed and undistorted. But no chance to zoom in. However, at least one station from Baltimore seems to like to switch back to unstretched mode when their HD programming ends, which means the SD image appears short and fat again on that -1 subchannel. Obviously, I don't know all the nuances that cause these effects on transmission. To me, these are the sort of problems that need to be ironed out. I'm convinced that a huge number of consumers out there think that wide screen TV simply means that images are distorted to fill the screen horizontally, and they probably wonder why this is supposed to be desirable. Bert ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.