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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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So recently, I got a CRT monitor, a HP one, and it's really good all things considered! The colours are great, and so is the picture.
Though like many CRTs from the era, it's 4:3. This means any widescreen videos or DVDs I send through the thing is letterboxed. Honestly, this doesn't bother me as much as I expected. I watched my Amazing World of Gumball DVDs on it, letterboxed throughout, but the colours were so much better than on my LCD, that it was a good trade-off!
So what about 4:3 stuff? They'd be fullscreen, right? Well, most are, but there are some videos online, and even some DVDs, that give you a hard-coded windowbox.
I have a question: WHY?! There's no reason to do this!
Many will be thinking about widescreen VHS tapes doing a similar thing, but with a letterbox. Thing is those made sense at the time. Display ports didn't know what aspect ratio something was, and neither did the TV. People won't know enough about aspect ratio won't know either.
Given most TVs during the VHS era were 4:3, it was a safe bet to make VHS tapes letterboxed.
This isn't the case these days. Since DVDs, our devices know what aspect ratio something is, and will adjust the TV display accordingly, like with watching widescreen videos on the CRT, it automatically adds the letterbox for me. People who don't care for aspect ratio won't have to lift a finger. It's all done for them.
The Bob Ross stream on Twitch does hard-coded bars (see photo above), and all for a 5 second intro segment between episodes. You're really going to make us with 4:3 displays deal with a windowbox so you can get in a 5 second segment that you could have easily made 4:3?
As far as I know, HD resolution doesn't care about the aspect ratio, the numbers for each variant (720p, 1080p, etc.) refer only to the height. 4K I think refers to the combined pixels of both, but I digress.
That's not even the worst offender I've seen for this either. I got a DVD of the best of WWF/E 1996, and decided to watch that on my CRT. Again, hard-coded bars. This is worse than last time, because it's wasting precious pixels.
The thing with DVDs is that it's naturally a 4:3 format, and widescreen video gets stretched to fit the screen, and if the display is 4:3, it squezes it veritcally. (This is known as anamorphic widescreen, for those who don't know. It's about the only interesting thing about DVD, in my opinion, but again. I digress.)
By adding hard-coded pillars, you're legit wasting pixels. on each side, and halving the actual footage, and it just isn't needed!
Some games have even done this. I recently got Resident Evil 0 on PC, and found it has a "original" aspect ratio mode where more of the top and bottom of the screen are revealed. Great! I'll just put it on my CRT and set the resolution to-
It's baffling because the game it's porting from is 4:3, meaning they manually added the bars! It's not just no effort, it's effort into making things shitter!
I don't understand why companies would ever do this... Please be considerate to actual 4:3 viewers, the tech has taken care of the bars/pillar problem for you. Unless humans have still found a way to screw it up, in which case I'm baffled. How could people be this stupid....
I'll just end this with a fun fact: I found out Anamorphic widescreen VHS tapes exist, I got a copy of Austin Powers: The Spy who Shagged Me Widescreen on VHS, and it took me a good 20 minutes to realise the image was supposed to be strateched anamorphically, after noticing characters and props were a lot thinner than they should be.
So there you go, you can get widescreen tapes that use the full res. Not many are out there that I know of, and it's not information that will ever come in handy for anything, but there you go!
Anyway, I'm out. See you in another few months!
