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Once upon a time, screens were 4:3, video equipment produced 4:3 video, YouTube videos were 4:3, and all was well.
Then the industry said: Let there be 16:9. And there was 16:9. And the chaos began.
It began with 16:9 TVs which deformed 4:3 material to fit the 16:9 screen, and players that allowed to configure a 4:3 screen for output, but deformed 16:9 material to fit the 4:3 screen instead. But not only that, even TV stations did deform 4:3 material they used in 16:9 broadcasts (like old 4:3 recordings showed in new 16:9 news). It continued with pure 4:3 broadcasts no longer being broadcast in 4:3 (although still technically possible and understood perfectly by any 16:9 TV), but 16:9 with black bars left and right, which on a 4:3 TV causes a black frame around an image that is much smaller than necessary.
But at least those were professionals, so while their decisions were not always what you would wish, what they did was at least halfway sensible. But on YouTube, you'll find an even worse situation: 4:3 material converted from 16:9 to 4:3. What this results in is a square image surrounded by black bars left and right, and certainly again the ugly distortions which non-proportional rescaling brings.
In short, since the advent of 16:9, there are masses of terribly distorted videos. And strangely, I've not even seen a single comment about that terrible distortion (but maybe having a minimal sense for aesthetics is strongly correlated with having no desire to get an account with Google — which actually is the main reason why I didn't leave such a comment on such videos).
OK, granted, I no longer see any comments on YouTube, so I can't tell if it has changed (I guess it's related to Google+ integration). But I'd expect such comments to have been made early on anyway.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday June 01 2014, @10:07PM
Great post.
It's like they ran out of ideas, and are now just annoyingly dicking with specifications as a justification for selling you more shit. "It's the next new thing!" As if they are hiring the Firefox UI developers.
(Score: 2) by Jaruzel on Monday June 02 2014, @10:01AM
.. until the superwide 21:9 TVs start hitting mainstream!
http://www.soundandvision.co.uk/tv/lcd/philips-56pfl9954h [soundandvision.co.uk]
This is my opinion, there are many others, but this one is mine.
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 02 2014, @10:55AM
As usual, the blame can rest at the feet of the typical joe sixpack dullard.
He/she just could not understand why his/her new "widescreen" tv was showing a picture with black bars on the left and right.... "But the picture does not fill the screen" he/she would be heard to complain. "I'm not getting all the "widescreen" goodness I paid for"...
All because the dullard did not understand aspect ratios and scaling.
And what did the manufactures do? Well, after fielding 3,000 phone calls, and who knows how many warranty returns, because "the picture did not fill the screen", they responded by changing their scalers built in to convert 4:3 into 16:9 from proper scaling (black bars) to stretch scaling (just cram it onscreen so it fills the blasted thing).
And suddenly, joe sixpack was happy. His/her new widescreen was now "using the whole damn screen". Never mind that the image was distorted. Detecting that distortion required an IQ 20+ points higher than what joe sixpack has to work with. And so, the complaint calls, and warranty service calls, dwindled down to the normal level of "I can't figure out how to connect the red plug to the red socket and white plug to the white socket" type calls.
(Score: 1) by rcamera on Monday June 02 2014, @11:20AM
and those of us with the ability to understand aspect ratio simply hit the zoom/aspect button the proper number of times until the 4:3 is back to the proper ratio. in fact, if you have a decent enough tv, you can probably tell it the default behavior for 4:3 sources. what, exactly, is the problem?
/* no comment */
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday June 02 2014, @07:25PM
The problem comes if the 4:3 material is already sent as "16:9" material by the broadcaster, and especially if your TV is old enough that it simply has no zoom/aspect button. And even if it has one, it is an extra step which is annoying, and which you simply should not need. And where exactly is the button to rescale YouTube videos?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Friday April 15 2016, @06:13PM
I totally get your preference for 4:3 content. To me, the most compelling argument for 4:3 is that it's much closer to a normal humans field of view than 16:9 is.
I'm not sure about your complaints regarding YouTube, since we're mostly talking about user submitted content. A user submitted video could sporadically switch between 4:3 and 16:9 mid video. Let's say we have a video that starts with content stretched from 4:3 to 16:9, goes on to natively 16:9 content, and ends with 4:3 content and verticle black bars. If you tell YouTube to smoosh the stretched out video back to 4:3 with black bars should it then also smoosh the natively proportioned segments that follows? My kneejerk reaction is no, but I also wouldn't want it to automatically change the author's content. Maybe the author is making jokes about aspect ratios, and I won't get them because the video was programatically changed in a way I didn't understand (extreme example, but it illustrates my point). I could see the dumb implementation being useful in a large number of cases, but it's a weird hack that you might regret clicking on if the video changes aspect ratios partway through. In the vast majority of cases, I would like to see a video in whatever format it was uploaded in. Most monitors and televisions have aspect ratio controls now so I can override that behavior for poorly sized long format content.
As a side note, I think some uploaders change aspect ratios (and other weirdness like zooming in on part of the screen or flipping the video horizontally) to avoid getting spotted by copyright infringement bots.
(Score: 2) by unitron on Monday June 02 2014, @06:06PM
...is that the same people who make TV screens are the ones who make computer monitor screens, so if you want to buy a tall-screen monitor rather than a wide screen monitor your choices are few and far between.
I'm old-fashioned and prefer to watch TV stuff on a TV and do computer stuff on a screen with enough verticality for more than one paragraph of text at a time.
something something Slashcott something something Beta something something
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday June 03 2014, @02:14AM
Rotate your monitor PI/4 (on linux: man xrandr)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by juggs on Wednesday June 04 2014, @05:32AM
Sound advice. 16:9 screens are fine for most video media consumption ~provided~ one can find the media in a genuine 16:9 format.
I'd go further though. If funds allow go dual (or even triple) screen. One 16:9 in landscape orientation for said media use, then another one (or more) in portrait orientation for text based stuff such as soylent, email, coding, terminal type use.
It can get a bit pricey, but I recommend looking for monitors that are made with VESA standard mounting points so the supplied stand can be ditched and something like http://www.domu.co.uk/vonhaus-triple-lcd-led-monitor-desk-mount-bracket-for-15-34-45-24-34-screens.html [domu.co.uk] used instead.
N.B. I am not recommending domu.co.uk or that particular product as I have used neither. It was just the first to hand for illustration purposes.
Even with one screen a screen bracket makes sense as you can usually rotate between the two orientations depending on the current task. Most linux desktop distros cope with this orientation stuff through friendly GUI "preferences" appplications these days so the the dark days of delving into the guts of xrandr or hand carving a bespoke xorg.conf have long gone. No doubt the same is to be found on Windows and Mac OSes - I'm just not familiar.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Thursday June 05 2014, @09:59PM
Be sure to get a decent screen if you want to rotate it, otherwise each eye will get a noticeably different image and it will suck.
(Score: 2) by juggs on Friday June 06 2014, @01:13AM
Any recommendations?
My current panels are coming to EOL (fading, increasing backlight bleed through and the colour palette is decidedly unwell) so I'm in the market for replacements.
(Score: 2) by chromas on Friday June 06 2014, @03:11AM
IPS displays are good for rotated usage but cost a little extra. There are some on Amazon under $200 with good reviews, for example, this small Dell. [amazon.com]
Some day I will upgrade but for now, un-rotated TNs for me.