[opendtv] Re: Popular screen aspect ratios

  • From: Albert Manfredi <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 30 Dec 2010 17:46:47 -0500

Craig Birkmaier wrote:
 
> Dumb PCs.
>
> Mac negotiates with the display
 
Aaaahh, FINALLY.
 
And don't pretend I hadn't offered up that possibility about a zillion times in 
recent posts, without you ever picking up on it. This is the same discussion as 
why your TV STB *must* ask the user about the aspect ratio of his display.
 
You never wondered how this happens with your Apple products, and why common CE 
devices like STBs and TV screens, especially when fed by one-way analog 
interfaces, might not work that way? For instance, did you assume that an ATSC 
STB, or a DVD player, or a cable STB, connected to the TV monitor via one-way 
anlog interface, somehow got that display information back to the STB, by some 
stroke of magic? You never thought that maybe your inbred Apple products have 
their own walled-garden proprietary interface standards that let the MPEG 
decoder know what the display looks like?
 
This has nothing to do with the MPEG-2 metadata that you keep harping about. 
This is what the ATSC was trying to get the FCC to understand, and this is what 
the FCC remained clueless about. But the industry, made up of people who have 
to make their products actually work, thankfully took matters into their own 
hands.
 
Note: I don't know this for sure, but possibly HDMI does offer such a 2-way 
service. HDMI did not exist in 1991 or 1994, Craig, nor did the FCC, after 
failing to set any display standards, force the industry to establish a two-way 
decoder-monitor interface standard.
 
I mentioned this before, and I'll repeat it here. When I first plugged in my PC 
to the HDTV, via RGB analog interface, the PC was set to 1360 X 768, but the TV 
was set to its native 1366 X 768. Guess what, Craig? It didn't look right. The 
right side of the screen was black. Since the HDTV did not come with a PC setup 
disc, I had to hope that the PC or the TV had that strange setting already 
available.
 
I checked the PC first. Nope. So then I went to the TV's setup menu. When set 
to the RGB input, the TV's setup menu has an extra "screen" option in it, not 
present in the other input settings. I opened that option, and voila, there was 
the 1360 X 768 box, waiting to be selected. But I had to select it. The PC 
didn't know from Adam.
 
Bert
                                           
 
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