Date : Sat, 25 Jul 2009 11:50:23 +0100
From : robert@... (Rob)
Subject: Fw: Fwd: ITV Teletext to shut down in January
On 24/07/2009, Rick Murray <rick@...> wrote:
> As an amusing anecdote, I have a brief recording of "Alone In The Dark"
> (Christian Slater/Tara Reid) which was showing on both ITV4 *and* Zone
> Horror at the same time on the same night. Different positions due to
> different advert timing, but anyway, it amused me...
On a similar note, I remember once, many many years ago, sitting down
to watch Ever Decreasing Circles I think it was. Plot line was the
whole street were invited to a local village hall to discuss setting
up a homewatch. When they got home, everybody had been burgled and
homes cleared out completely. The next programme on the channel was
Terry and June. Plot line was the whole street were invited to a
local village hall to discuss setting up a homewatch. When they got
home, everybody had been burgled and homes cleared out completely.
Erm. Deja-vu ..
> When you are dealing with a pre-letterboxed picture, like most of those
> on Zone Horror, you don't have that choice. I wonder how a widescreen TV
> would handle a widescreen film letterboxed into a traditional frame? I
> would like to think it would throw away the black bars and zoom the
> picture up, but I have doubts as to if many TVs are that clever. Quality
> would suck, in any case.
If you are actually watching it as a 4:3 picture on the widescreen
telly, so you have bars down the sides, then yep, you'll usualy get
the bars at the top and the bottom, too, so ending up with a small
picture in the middle. This is where the "zoom" button comes in.
However, almost every wide-screen telly I've come across at friends
and family seems to be permenantly in the default "stretch" mode.
i.e. it stretches 4:3 pictures out sideways to fill the screen, making
everybody seem short and fat. Feed a letterbox picture into that and
you get an extra wide thin mess. And they seem to put up with it!!!
(It's amazing how many Sky boxes I come across connected to a
widescreen telly that are still configured for a 4:3 one, so they
never even output a widescreen picture, and *everything* is in
stretchy-vision. What's the blooming point? I always sneak into the
settings and fix that, when I see it...)
I did have one TV once, a Panasonic 28" Widescreen non-HD CRT model,
that had a zoom mode called "Auto" that did exactly what it should -
if it spotted a letterbox in a 4:3 picture it would zoom it out,
otherwise would show it as nature intended. But DOGs in the black
bars would confuse it if they were big enough, and there was always a
slight delay while it decided what it was going to do, which caused a
lot of zooming in and out on transitions - this was particularly bad
on commercial channels when adverts came in a mix of formats.. And I
once tried to watch a film where the subtitles sometimes made there
way down into the black bars ....
>
> Don't have that option, and as I tend to like the subtitled oddities
> (from "I'm A Cyborg, But That's Okay" to "Battle Royale" (not the
> sequel) to "Princess Mononoke"), I wonder how well such a service would
> suit? I'm not really 'in' to blockbusters.
Similar tastes in this household .. We just pay for an ISP with a
proper unlimited download allowance .....
>
> What's the reasoning behind a DOG these days? People who are so inclined
> can download MPEG4 movies in an acceptable quality, so I don't think
> plastering a branding on stuff is going to help much. They can't use the
> logic of letting people know what channel they are watching - the
> constant adverts do that, and if you really need to know right this
> instant, the 'i' / 'info' / 'prog' (etc etc) button will tell you the
> channel and the programme.
One occasion, when we bought some foreign import anime DVDs, a few
turned out to be really poor quality, complete with some TV channel
logos in the corner. (They were properly pressed DVDs, too, not
DVDR..) I guess it's possible that the channels put them on to
dissuade the output from ending up in such places! Nobody cares about
logos if it's just an odd episode you've downloaded to watch, but you
wouldn't want to compile and flog DVDs with them on there it does make
it obvious that it's not a proper from-source issue.
>
> When Zone Horror is letterboxing a film, most of the dog can be cut out
> by clipping off the black bars. For the small part that remains, I did
> once knock up some code to remove it by interpolating nearby pixels, but
> I suspect writing it as a VirtualDub plug-in would require x86 code. Yuck.
There's already a virtualdub filter called "logoaway" that should do the job..
Getting wildly off-topic ...
Rob