TelstraClear's feed of TV3

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TomAckroyd

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#13204 27-Apr-2007 19:52

Just spoke to TelstraClear who accept there is a fault with their feed of TV3. Their senior engineers are "dealing with changes TV3 have made to the feed" and are working on a fix.

Since at least last night pictures are stretched more than they should be. Viewers will be seeing the 4:3 centre-crop portion of pictures stretched to fill a 16:9 aspect.

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#68710 27-Apr-2007 21:05

Thanks for the update Tom, I was wondering if my STB was playing up. It nice to know it's not just me...

lchiu7

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#68767 28-Apr-2007 16:07

Interesting comparing the TV3 feed on TCL versus Freeview. I now watch TV3 via Freeview and didn't notice the problem till alerted to via this thread.

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cyril7

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#68771 28-Apr-2007 16:25

There is an issue with the TV3 feed on the FreeView 12.456GHz mux, I have had a conversation with a duty TV3 engineer who is looking into it. It would appear that somehow someone has set the AR flags to 4:3 but the material itself is full height anamorphic 16:9. This means that on a 4:3 display you will see a full height (everyone tall and skinny) image. You may also get odd results on a 16:9 display. The tech I spoke to was looking into the problem, when its fixed who knows. This does not seem to effect the Sky stream of TV3.

The above issue came about around 6:30 last evening during the news, when I rang TV3 this morning they were totally unaware of it, till I spent sometime explaining the problem.

Cyril

Loftus

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#68774 28-Apr-2007 17:25

With the "official" lauch of freeview happening soon, I hope they get it sorted out quickly

lyall

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#69159 1-May-2007 22:36

Huh. My TV3 has gone back to 4:3 - shame. Are other people on TCL seeing the same thing? I assume so - Nat Geo is still widescreen so I figure it's not a problem at my end.

Is this just TCL, or have TV3 gone back to 4:3 I wonder. It's odd - the widescreen ads are now letterboxed, which looks very strange!

lurker

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#69160 1-May-2007 22:49

Haven't seen TV3 at 16:9 yet, I do hope they get it sorted soon. Would be good if they put a note up on the faults page. I know it's not a major thing but they did have an entry when the switch initially happened, to advise people there was nothing wrong with the picture once it went widescreen.

TomAckroyd

95 posts

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#69173 2-May-2007 07:37

lyall:

Huh. My TV3 has gone back to 4:3 - shame. Are other people on TCL seeing the same thing? I assume so - Nat Geo is still widescreen so I figure it's not a problem at my end.

Is this just TCL, or have TV3 gone back to 4:3 I wonder. It's odd - the widescreen ads are now letterboxed, which looks very strange!

Same here. It's just as it was before the switch. The pictures don't look zoomed in either which suggests these are true 4:3 pix from TV3.

[edit]
The TelstraClear feed is the analogue 13:9 letterbox signal from TV3.

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#69188 2-May-2007 09:10

OK just called Telstra. Apparently due to the number of complaints they have switched back to the 4:3 signal until further notice.

Please call Telstra and complain! Due to people not having a clue we are going to be stuck in the dark ages!

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sbiddle

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#69189 2-May-2007 09:25

Calling them won't change anything and good luck even getting through to the cleaner who might answer the phone after 90 mins on hold! :-)

The simple solution is to run both WS and 4:3 feeds of TV3 over digital and give people the choice.

lyall

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#69192 2-May-2007 09:28

That's just depressingly predictable. The lowest common denominator wins again.

Surely, while they had these complainers on the phone, they could have just told them how to set up their STBs to cope. Or maybe TCL's boxes aren't up to it?

What a shame the Freeview hardware is so expensive.

cyril7

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#69196 2-May-2007 09:51

So by switching back to 4:3 will make the issue go away, they have to do it sometime, why not now, putting your head in the sand is rediculous.

Cyril

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#69197 2-May-2007 10:04

It "only" took around 20 mins to get through. I was going to call last night but could not be bothered waiting.

sbiddle if those of us that do want widescreen TV don't complain then there will be no chance of it being sorted. Obviously it does work... it is because enough idiots called and complained that it was widescreen that they switched it back. The guy did say that they are looking at options and should have something early this month but god knows what that will be.

As lyall said. Once again the lowest common denominator wins.. I bet half the people that complained have wide screen TV's but have got so used to seeing everything stretched out that they thought it was showing wrong on their TV's

I know I had to talk the guy I car pool with through setting his Telstra box up to display correctly. The sad thing with that is that he had the wide screen TV when he got digital and yet the installer still set it up incorrectly.

The thing I don't understand is that from what I saw the only stuff that was not displaying correctly on wide screen was the ads and archived footage of the news. Why are people suddenly so upset that ad's are not displaying full screen?

Does anyone know what percentage of digital TV subscribers own wide-screen TV's? surely it is well above the average for NZ.

lyall

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#69203 2-May-2007 11:09

sbiddle if those of us that do want widescreen TV don't complain then there will be no chance of it being sorted.

Obviously it does work... it is because enough idiots called and complained that it was widescreen that they switched it back. The guy did say that they are looking at options and should have something early this month but god knows what that will be.

I agree - useless as it will probably seem, if we don't complain to TCL there's not much point us whingeing here! I shall try early tomorrow when it doesn't involve half my day waiting. (There really should be a law requiring adequate customer service in this country, but that's another discussion.)

Have to say though that I'm inclined to blame TCL rather than the complainers for this. If I had 4:3 and my picture was suddenly letterboxed I wouldn't be happy either - remember most people aren't comfortable venturing beyond the channel & volume buttons on their remotes and aren't going to be delving into the STB settings unassisted. TCL should be helping them out when they ring up, or finding some other solution that works for both sides, not adopting this dumbarse non-solution.

I bet half the people that complained have wide screen TV's but have got so used to seeing everything stretched out that they thought it was showing wrong on their TV's

Now these people I have no sympathy for.

I know I had to talk the guy I car pool with through setting his Telstra box up to display correctly. The sad thing with that is that he had the wide screen TV when he got digital and yet the installer still set it up incorrectly.

Yeah, the subcontracted installers are staggeringly, breathtakingly bad at their jobs. I can only assume the company name Astute is intended to be sarcastic.

The thing I don't understand is that from what I saw the only stuff that was not displaying correctly on wide screen was the ads and archived footage of the news. Why are people suddenly so upset that ad's are not displaying full screen?

I think it's more that the 4:3ers would have been seeing letterbox black bars, right?

munchkin

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#69385 3-May-2007 10:55

I did notice before the feed was switched back to 4:3 that some American widescreen shows were letterboxed and the windowboxed over that, meaning that the widescreen show now took up a quarter of the space on the screen. Easy to fix with the zoom button, but still repetitive.

16:9 was much better than 4:3 though.

TomAckroyd

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#69388 3-May-2007 11:07

Telstra repeated the "due to customer complaints" excuse to me yesterday. I asked them to think what would happen if SKY did the same thing.

Seems to me the broadcasters have stuffed up by not proactively educating viewers about the reasons for the switch, and how best to view pictures.

There is also a common belief too that widescreen=HD.

Please everyone put pressure on CanWest (09 377 9730 ) to demand of TelstraClear that they transmit the correct pictures, and to *help them achieve it* by formatting their content correctly.

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