Aspect Ratio Changes Have No Effect on TW 8300HD

[daehl]

I've been using a Time Warner 8300HD for about a year now. One thing that has always stumped me is the "Aspect Ratio" options in the "More Settings" menu. No matter what selection I make, nothing changes on my video--on either the composite, s-video, or component outputs. As far as I can tell, those settings are totally ignored. Has anyone else experienced anything different?

Specifically, I would like to force the video to be set to: STANDARD (4:3) TV with SQUEEZE (16:9) PICTURE. But, no matter what option is chosen and displayed in the Aspect Ratio settings, it always acts as if it's instead set to: STANDARD (4:3) TV with LETTERBOX (16:9) PICTURE.

There's a very good reason why I want to change this setting. If this option worked, it would be very easy to create 480i Anamorphic recordings of HD video when recording the content on a DVD recorder. I have done this successfully using the component outputs on my 8300HD already, but for reasons that are out of the scope of this question, I'd much prefer to use the s-video or composite outputs to do the exact same thing. Unfortunately, no matter what I choose in the Aspect Ratio menu, there is no change to the video signal. Always those dreaded horizontal grey bars!

I've called Time Warner customer support and visited the Mayfair store--but all of their supposed "experts" know little or nothing about the Scientific Atlantic boxes or how they're configured. I've tried forcing the unit to SD mode (which worked fine when I had a 8000HD) but is disabled on the 8300HD. I've tried all the possible video modes (not just 480i) to no effect. I've tried using each video-out port by itself (one at a time) and rebooting the 8300HD in between each attempt... No luck.

My setup includes:

Time Warner 8300HD DVR (composite, s-video, and component outputs all active) forced to 480i output when connected to DVD-Recorder.
Pioneer DVDR615/37 DVD-Recorder (composite, s-video, and component inputs & outputs) accepts 480i input only, but I can edit the resulting IFO to force anamorphic display mode.
Mitsubishi 1080i 55" rear-projection display (connected via component inputs) also displays 720p, 720i, 480p, 480i.
Sony SD LCD display (for viewing composite & s-video outputs of DVR) displays 480i only.


My suspicion is that Time Warner has disabled the Aspect Ratio settings, but I can't get anyone at Time Warner to confirm that, and if so, then why didn't just remove the menu option entirely?!?

If anyone has any information or advice, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!

Don

[Mark Strube]

Aspect ratio settings do change when you're watching on a 16:9 widescreen television. They have no effect when viewing in 4:3 mode.