[OT] Why do so few people understand aspect ratios?

[Thomas Milne]

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 08:34:36PM -0400, Thomas Milne wrote:
>> I don't know if anyone on here does any video encoding, but can anyone
>> tell me why it is that so many people insist on adding the black bars
>> to their videos? It's amazing how many people I run into who cannot
>> seem to grasp the difference between 4:3, 16:9 and panoramic. They
>> think if a movie is widescreen, ie. 16:9, they need to add the black
>> bars to 'pad' the video...why?
>>
>> Are their TV's wrong? Their computer displays? I've had all kinds of
>> TV's, old CRT and flat screen, I've never, ever, needed to mess with
>> video to make it display properly. Ever.
>
> I strangely have never run into a video that had black bars in the video
> stream itself.  Can't be that common a problem.

Unfortunately, it's getting worse lately, perhaps because a lot of
amateurs are getting involved, and people using crappy
equipment/software.

> Obviously you just include the actual video in the stream along with the
> header indicating the resolution and aspect ratio to use for playback
> and the player does the rest.
>

EXACTLY, thank you. I have to admit, I was kinda waiting for you to
weigh in on this ;)

I can't complain _too much_, because the videos I'm talking about are
not 'legitimate'. I just didn't realize there were actually displays
out there that were such bad quality.

-- 
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