Forgive me, but I am rather new to Blu Ray viewing. I recently acquired a new TV, Blu Ray player, and TOS on Blu Ray. Before I had the player, I had been watching the series streamed from CBS. It would fill the entire screen. Now that I am watching the Blu Ray discs, I am noticing that the edges of the screen appear to be dark on each side. The only way I can get the screen to fill is to zoom, but then I start loosing the top/ bottom of the view. All I can determine is that the ratio when streamed was 16:9 and the Blu Rays appear to be 4:3, so I'm guessing that the screen edge darkness is normal?? If so, that's a bit disappointing but then again I do want to view the series the correct way.
question about TOS on Blu Ray
- Thread starter billsantos
- Start date
Star Trek's aspect ratio has always been 4:3 — whether on Laserdisc, VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray, internet streams or television broadcasts. The black bars left and right are neither the fault of the Blu-Rays nor The Original Series itself, but rather the effect of watching a 4:3 program on a 16:9 screen. It's the correct way of displaying the series on your television set. Everything else would either distort the image or cut off parts of it.
Thanks, that seems to answer the question about the blackness along the side of the screen then. I do wonder how CBS gets around it though as their 1080p streams of TOS appear to be 16:9. Perhaps they resample the video or something, but their stream doesn't seem distorted on my widescreen set.
Absolutely correct! I for one am very happy that the Blu Ray's are presented in the 4:3 format. The problem I'm experiencing with my Blu Ray player, is that it cannot play 4:3 DVD's correctly. It's either cropped or distorted. No matter how I try to configure my TV or my player, it just doesn't display them correctly, with black bars at the sides. ery frustrating.....
According to what I've read, there seems to be a lot of problems trying to properly play DVD with Blu Ray systems. Not sure why, but it seems the higher end BR players have less trouble. I have yet to try a DVD on my new BR player though. I am keeping the DVD player hooked up just in case.
Hm, unfortunately I can't give you an answer to that. The episode streams on CBS.com are not available in my country, so I can't take a look. But they should be 4:3, otherwise they are actually cutting down or stretching the image. Are you watching the streams on fullscreen? Because another possibility is that your computer is stretching the image to fit the screen.
Actually it would be very interesting to see a screengrab of one of their streams.
Both of my BD players (old Samsung and LG dual players)have this problem, too. The only solution, when watching a 4:3 DVD, is to set the BD player to output resolution 480i and screen size 4:3. Then, when you switch back to a WS DVD or any BD, you have to remember to change the resolution back to 720p or 1080p. It's a real hassle. Some newer BD players, like the Oppo models, do allow you to send 4:3 content correctly to the TV. I'm going to replace my old players w/ Oppos when I can afford it.
Doug
Good tip, Doug! I'm certainly gonna give that a try..!
billsantos hopefully your Blu-ray player is BD Live Profile 2.0 and you can hook it up to the Internet to get the additional included CBS BD-Live portal access (Online Extras)
The Playstation 3 plays both DVD and Blu-Ray discs flawlessly. I never have to mess with the display settings.
The PS3 is easily the best Blu-Ray player I've gotten. I use it more to watch discs and to play games. It's really an outstanding player.
Hi guys!
My pleasure to give you my suggestions.
Let me see what do you have:
1.TV
2.Blu-ray player
3.Blu-ray disc(TOS)
Can you connect Blu-ray player with your PC?
if can, I will recommend you just need to rip Blu-ray(TOS) to HD Video format(16:9), through a Blu-ray ripping software convert it, very easy!
Hi guys!
My pleasure to give you my suggestions.
Let me see what do you have:
1.TV
2.Blu-ray player
3.Blu-ray disc(TOS)
Can you connect Blu-ray player with your PC?
if can, I will recommend you just need to rip Blu-ray(TOS) to HD Video format(16:9), through a Blu-ray ripping software convert it, very easy!
This particular player cannot. I had thought about that originally- having a burner that would work both with the TV and PC- but I had only a limited budget to work with. I suppose if I simply had an internal PC Blu Ray burner, I could do the conversion. For now, I will tolerate the 4:3 of TOS on Blu-ray. The edge darkness along each side of the screen is acceptable and I can always zoom in a bit for full screen, even if the top/ bottom gets cut off slightly. The CBS 1080p streams are already in 16:9 and I believe it is possible to record those (although I haven't tried). Just viewing the CBS streams on the screen, I can say that the video quality is pretty close to Blu-ray. A bit of artifacting in the dark areas, but the result is still quite nice on the widescreen. Not bad considering a fairly robust compression ratio over Blu-ray.
When a tv station or such is streaming a 4x3 show for 16x9 display, in order to avoid complaints from folks like yourself about the image not filling up the screen, they either stretch the image or chop off the top and bottom, or do both.
There is also a method of taking just a little bit off the top and bottom, and then stretching the remaining image in such a way that the distortion is lesser towards the center of the image, but greater towards the edges. You can tell this last one is being done if a geometric shape is in the background looks fine in the middle of the screen, but when the images pans to one side it stretches like taffy.
But TOS (along with TAS, TNG, DS9, and VOY) were almost meant to be seen at 4x3, and always will, no matter the home video technology.
And while I'm at it, all the Trek films are presented at a "scope" aspect ratio of 2:35:1 and will have black bars on the top and bottom of your 16x9 display.
Only Enterprise was filmed in the 16x9 aspect ratio (approx 1.77:1).
There is also a method of taking just a little bit off the top and bottom, and then stretching the remaining image in such a way that the distortion is lesser towards the center of the image, but greater towards the edges. You can tell this last one is being done if a geometric shape is in the background looks fine in the middle of the screen, but when the images pans to one side it stretches like taffy.
But TOS (along with TAS, TNG, DS9, and VOY) were almost meant to be seen at 4x3, and always will, no matter the home video technology.
And while I'm at it, all the Trek films are presented at a "scope" aspect ratio of 2:35:1 and will have black bars on the top and bottom of your 16x9 display.
Only Enterprise was filmed in the 16x9 aspect ratio (approx 1.77:1).
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