Toshiba DVD & HDTV

[penguin21]

I have a 50HDX82 HDTV and a S3805 DVD and connected with component cables.  When I play a DVD, it still needs to be stretched on the TV.  Is this standard?

Also what is the correct way to hook up the new HD TWC box?

[JohnRacine]

I have a Toshiba 65HX81 with a Toshiba SD-4700 DVD player.  I don't have to do any stretching.  Once in awhile I rent a DVD that has an inch or two black bars on top and bottom but none yet that have any bars on the sides.  Most DVD's fit my 16x9 screen perfectly. For those that have bars on the top/bottom, I can use the zoom feature to eliminate them if I wish but that degrades the picture somewhat. I do not have TWC so I can't help you there...I have 4DTV+HDD200. Hope this helps.

[Rafiki]

I have a Toshiba SD-6200 and I have no problem. When I set up the player I gave it a setting for always delivering a 16x9 picture.  On some DVDs it is necessary to choose between Regular and widescreen. A good example is Monsters Inc.

Enjoy.

[borghe]

A couple of things to remember about using DVD players with HDTV.

1) Make sure you go into the DVD player setup and select 16:9 TV/Display. ALL DVD players ship with the player set to a 4:3 display.

2) Not all DVDs are widescreen. In particular, all movies pre-1950's and most TV content will be 4:3 meaning you will either have to stretch it or display bars on the side of the TV.

3) There are two types of prevalent widescreen formats. 1.85:1 and 2.35:1. 1.85:1 will fill up your TV in standard mode. This is mainly used for comedies and dramas. 2.35:1 WILL NOT fill up your screen. You will still have thin black bars on the top and bottom. This format is mainly used for action and horror flicks.

4) Finally, this is the trickiest. Most widescreen DVDs are formatted in what's called anamorphic widescreen. With this method, the picture is stored on the disc to fit a widescreen TV. When it plays it on our TVs, the picture either fills the entire screen, or in the case of 2.35:1 movies, with minimal black bars. When it is played back on a normal TV, the DVD player adds extra black bars to the top and bottom (basically). Unfortunately, a number of widescreen DVDs (and most special feature content) is not encoded anamorphically. What this means is that the picture was recorded designed to fit on a 4:3 TV, not an HDTV. You can tell because everything is squashed and you will have black bars on your screen for 1:85.1 material and huge black bars on your screen for 2.35:1 material. There is nothing wrong with your player or TV, this is how the studio encoded the movie. If this is the case, most HDTV's have an option to zoom or expand the picture to correctly display it.

[ReesR]

Fantastic!  I had not had time yet to dive into the issues regarding anamorphic widescreen and all the different "aspects" of it.  Ok ok, hiss boo.  (grin) Thanks for the easy to understand explanation.  And for saving me the time to research it.

------------------
Rees Roberts
Racine, WI
reesr@wi.net

HDTV Receiver:  Sony KD-34XBR2
Bi-directional Yagi Antenna at 30 feet

[kjnorman]

Okay, I think the DVD side is pretty much answered.  Now to how to hook up the TW hidef box.

I am presuming you have the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 3100HD, which is what I have.

Firstly you must understand what picture formats are output by the box.  It has three outputs:

1) Composite:  This is the lowest level of picture quality and will only output standard NTSC (480i).  You should not need to use this output.

2) S-Video:  Also standard NTSC (480i) output, but better quality than (1) above.  The box does not downconvert HiDef to NTSC,  so you are not able to get a HDTV channel through the s-vid output.  You should still use this and run a s-video cable from the box to your TV (I'll explain why later..)

3) Component (ColorStream in Toshiba talk): These are the HiDef outputs and they output 1080i.  The 3100HD will not output 720p or 480p or 480i through the component outputs.  If the signal is not 1080i the it is converted to 1080i.  In other words, all standard programming is upconverted to 1080i.  

When you select a component (ColorStream) input on your TV and feed it the 1080i signal from the cable box, the tv will automatically go to full widescreen.  You will not have any zoom or ratio control on you 1080i inputs (I have the Toshiba 50HX81 and your 50HDX82 should be similar).

The lack of zoom and ratio control when watching on the component inputs can be annoying if you are watching a standard definition letterbox broadcast.  As the 3100HD does not have aspect control, you will end up with a letterboxed picture with black bars all around it.  To get around this, you need to use the s-video input.  This will feed the standard definition picture to you TV where you will then have full aspect control and can use the set's own internal scaler.

As for the audio, I just feed both the digital out and the analog out to my amp.  You need both, as the you will have no sound from the analog channels (<100) if you only use digital.  You can feed analog from the digital channels but the 3100HD D-A converter is not very good and the sound is "weak".  Also you will not be able to pick up dobly digital sound tracks on the digital channels.  Of course if you do not have an amp with digital inputs you can still use the analog.....

Finally, if you do not have an amp and are inputing the sound directly to your TV, then things get more tricky.  If you are going the S-Vid and Component route to the TV, then you will need to route sound to both inputs on the TV.  Unfortunately the 3100HD only has one set of analog outputs.  You will need to get a splitter cable to get two analog outputs from one set of connectors.  I have not tried this so I do not know how well it works.

In summary, the 3100HD is not a well designed cable box.  It is limited out outputs and functionality, but it is currently all we have to watch HDTV on cable.  So I'll take it for now.

Good luck and welcome to the club.

Kerry  


[This message has been edited by kjnorman (edited 09-29-2002).]