UNCORRECTABLE VERTICALLY SQUISHED VIDEO that is geometrically distorted, Letterboxed widescreen content on widescreen distribution channels

What is the receiver model? You can change picture settings by going to Menu, Settings, Slide Over to Display, go to TV Ratio, and choose Standard 4:3 (if necessary). Then, in the same Display section, go to ‘Video’ just above TV Ratio and ensure that Screen Format is set to ‘Crop.’ You may have to wrestle with the Screen Format setting until channel 267 occupies the entire screen. 

DTV has no control how a channel sends their programing.

To clarify……

(1) I verified with EarthXTV. They are sending DTV non Letterboxed widescreen video. DTV’s ingest processing is applying the letterbox.

(2) The aspect controls on the TV and the DTV receiver do not provide a setting to correct for wide screen material that is letterboxed. Try it yourself… the one that fills the screen “ZOOM” crops the left and right sides of the image. There is no setting to  stretch the video "only vertically" as this should never be needed. 16x9 video should not be letterboxed on a 16x9 channel. Only content that is wider than the 16x9 picture should be.

Whatever EarthXTV tells you, it looks to me like they are sending letterboxed widescreen video. Difficult to know one way or the other.

EDIT: It could also be a 4;3 SD picture they are stretching to 16:9

DTV does nothing to the signal except change it to beam to the sats.

Hello,

I work in a pay TV company (not DirecTV) so hear me out.

We talk about Aspect Ratio and scaling a lot. When @kevinspage mentioned "This causes horizontal black bars at top and bottom, makes circles in the video image to become ovals and people look  short and fat.", this issue is called SCALING. So understand me when I say someone could be seeing black bars on a 4X3 screen or 16X9 or anamorphic 2.35X1 screen but that is not normally a complaint by viewers...the typical complaint is wrong scaling.

There is SAR (Signal Aspect Ratio) and DAR (Display Aspect Ratio).

Some Set Top Boxes have software that are built smart enough to think the display is like old Cathode Ray Tube TVs i.e. 4X3 because of a composite video or rf coax connection or the display is a flat screen 16X9 TV because of the HDMI connection. So if you're lucky the STB will look at the SAR in the meta data of the video stream and decide what to do if the user has set to "AUTO". A STB will see 16X9 SAR in meta data and see HDMI connection and give the display a 16X9 scaling. The same STB will look at the same meta data of the same channel and see a 4X3 display and deliberately do the letterboxing (black bars at top and bottom) to arrive at the correct scaling. The simple math is 4X3 SAR is the same as 12X9. To make the comparisons easier anamorphic video can be called 21X9 just for simplicity (but is actually 2.35X1). So for correct scaling to watch 16X9 SD video on a 12X9 display, because naturally the horizontal axis is squeezed by a factor of 3/4 (to convert 16 to 12), the transcoder squeezes the vertical axis by the same factor of 3/4. And the same can be said when watching 21X9 on 16X9 display (squeeze factor becomes 21/16). I mentioned before if the user set the STB to AUTO because typically the user can also set the STB display to specific DAR values, specific crop values, pan scan, zoom, etc.

Now what if you're not so lucky. This is where we the viewer depend on the transcoding of the pay TV provider or his source video providers. The TV provider needs to decide if its customers are 16X9 displays only or both 16X9 and 4X3 displays. Some of them take one full screen 16X9 HD source (let's assume 1080p resolution, 60 frames per second) and send that as pass thru or may drop the bit rate a little but maintain the resolution and SAR as the HD version of the channel. Then for the SD version of the channel they transcode the same source and break down to SD resolutions and assume SD clients are using 4X3 TVs and so they deliberately do letterboxing to correct the scaling. This would work fine for 4X3 customers but would be annoying for the 16X9 customers. Some TV providers do so deliberately to annoy you to pay more for the HD package and then you'll get full screen. But this is not always the case and we cannot assume. I say this because some TV providers provide SD channels as 16X9 because they did their analysis, decided that people don't like letterboxing and 4X3 customers would be a minority or none, and everybody's happy. My team does this. Another possibility I've seen is that a source content provider deliberately provides the TV company with a HD feed that is 16X9 full screen and another SD feed of the same channel that is letterboxed 16X9 for the 4X3 displays and TV company has no choice because of the legal contract agreement. Another possibility is the source video company just doesn't care what you do with the feed so long as you (TV provider) is happy. Some pay TV companies unfortunately just doesn't have the financial resources to purchase the new and modern transcoders that can convert HD to SD and leave as 16X9 SAR, the equipment forces them to make the SAR 4X3 via letterboxing. Sometimes the annoying wrong scaling only takes places sometimes and not all time. So complaints reach the TV company, we check properly watching various content over a period of time and we see the complaint is legitimate and we try to fix on our transcoder. If not we escalate to the source provider and that sometimes is successful and they fix on their end but not always. So @kevinspage I cannot assume what anybody says is fact like @shannon02 says DTV does nothing to the signal except change it to beam to the sats..but this could be because they chose not to because trust me in this modern time the transcoders can do lots of fancy stuff because of all the complaints like this.

@kevinspage also said To clarify……

(1) I verified with EarthXTV. They are sending DTV non Letterboxed widescreen video. DTV’s ingest processing is applying the letterbox...again we cannot be sure but I want to believe you. As a first start try to watch EarthXTV via independent cable companies/platforms and see if the letterboxing is still there at all times or sometimes. If some of the others have a 16X9 full screen for the HD version then I might go the route of a complaint to both DTV and EarthXTV on the same email thread. I am trying to share my experience to let you know how complicated the situation can be and the facts we may never know.

Same issue here. It is unique to the Gemini. On a Genie, the Screen Format setting works on SD channels like this. It has a setting for how to handle SD channels (Pillar Box makes them display correctly). On a Gemini, however, the Screen Format setting does nothing on SD channels. (It does affect HD channels, stupidly.) The SD channels are just force stretched.

It seems like it’s a firmware error, as the Screen Format setting should apply to SD channels and not HD channels where the format is obvious.

yes, it's a gemini issue. But I think it's a long time since anybody sent SD widescreen signals. Fox used to do it when they did not want to invest in HD equipment.

Why would DTV need formatting for SD channels it will no longer have?

It is a 4:3 signal. The channels just are displaying letterboxed images in the 4:3 aspect. Even if you watch old 4:3 programs on an SD channel, the Gemini forces them to be stretched wide. The Screen Format option does nothing to an SD image. It does affect HD images, which it shouldn’t ever need to do. Seems like the firmware is incorrectly affecting HD and not SD, when it should be the other way around (like the Genie did).

DTV is not going to fix a non problem as the 4:3 signals are going to be gone. All programs will be broadcasted in HD MPEG4 including programs produced in SD.