Voom and Standard Definition TV?

[Dolfan]

I just had an installer here for a second receiver to my standard def TV. He advised me to cancel the install because voom does not look good on a regular TV. He said the picture would look stretched. Any Voomers watching non hi def TV's?

 

[Bilodeaumj]

Get another installer, your guy is on drugs! I bet most of us with multiple recievers have one or more SDTV's. Coming from the cable world my SD picture quality never looked so good! On the HD channels it's even better. You will get the "letterbox" effect on those movies shown in that format but that is not a SD picture thing.

As a side note, I recieved a new reciever yesterday and it was apparently factory installed to the "Strech Mode". Maybe the recievers he was dealing with are that way and he doesn;'t know enough to take it off the "stretch mode"...Good luck

 

[scottabs]

Maybe he meant "squashed" and not "stretched". My only complaint on a regular TV is with the local chanels when they put the bars on the side for 4x3 programming. But, that isn't Voom's fault. The network is just sending the signal with the bars to fit a 16x9 screen.

 

[Ronald_Jeremy]

Yes, you can control how the box handles HD and SD content. Stretch, compress, letterbox, pillbox.

It is in the installer menu.
Video settings I believe.

 

[scottabs]

I played around with those settings, and it was better for the locals, but I didn't feel like changing those options to fit whatever channel I was watching at that time.

But, to answer the original question, yes, I would get another receiver even though the TV is only SD.

 

[Dolfan]

On my locals the people look stretched from top to bottom(tall and thin) when the local channel is putting the bars on the side. All the voom channels look fine.

 

[jgantert]

Voom looks great on SD. Remember you still get DD 5.1. Where else are you going to get so many channels with 5.1 in the "base" package? I had D* for quite a while with a Dolby Digital receiver, but they only had PPV in Dolby Digital (plus premiums like HBO, SHO, etc). Voom has 21 exclusives in DD 5.1.

-John

 

[ram1220]

Voom looks good on my SD TV in the bedroom. My only gripe is that the program guide doesn't fit on the screen. Anyway to fix this?

 

[DarrellP]

For a SD TV, you need to set the image output for Pillarboxed and Letterboxed (I think those are the two). Don't use any stretch, crop, etc. Then set your stb for Auto resolution, this way, the 4:3 channels will fit the screen, otherwise when you hit the surf bar, you won't see the channel number.

 

[madpoet]

Again though, it does not help if your locals are putting in the pillar boxing.

 

[ram1220]

Thanks guys. I realized this right after I hit the send key.

 

[voomster2]

For whatever reason (VOOM/local station broadcasting method) I never was 100% satisfied with the pic on my SD TVs.

 

[BigTVSteve]

For most realistic (non-stretched) viewing of SD signals, you probably need to use the composite video output from your Voom receiver. It is active all of the time. It makes quite a difference on my large 4x3 HDTV set... None of the various format settings on my Voom receiver resulted in a satisfactory (non-fun-house) SD display when using the component cables to feed my set.