I submitted a question to CNN’s tech support asking why my player image is stretched into widescreen. Here is our conversation, starting with Kyle’s reply to my initial inquiry:

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June 23, 2009
Adam,

It should be in widescreen format. Do other sites stretch the aspect ratio as well? Have you removed previous versions of Flash?

Kyle
CNN.com Tech Support

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Re: TTS Helpdesk Ticket: 2495381

Hi Kyle– thanks for writing back. I noticed that for a short while Youtube did the same thing (stretching the 4:3 aspect ration to fit a 16:9 player window) but they fixed the software on their end and it subsequently played correctly on my PC.

I’m very good about keeping my software up to date, so it’s not a flash player issue. Incidentally, this same thing happens both at my home PC and my work PC (which our IT department maintains). I’m at my work PC now… I’ve attached a screenshot for you comparing two similar shots of Dr. Gupta…. the screenshot on the top is how my PC at home plays it as well.

Adam

One more thing, Kyle–

Look at this second image I’ve attached… notice that the CNN logo on the 16:9 player is not stretched and distorted the way Dr Gupta’s image is. The CNN logo in the 16:9 image It is the same size (proportionally) as the 4:3 Youtube video.

This says to me that the image distortion/stretch is coming from CNN.com and is not a user software issue.

Let me know what you find out

Thanks,
Adam

Adam,

Is this happening with all of our video? Can you send a link to the video it is occuring with?

Kyle

Yes, this happens on all the videos. Here is just one example

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/06/24/ac.shot.tues.cnn

Adam

Adam,

I see what you are talking about now. I suppose I just became accustomed to the way it looked after watching it for so long! I don’t think I’ll be able to do anything for you, as this is the ratio the producers are uploading. I wish I had a better fix/solution, but I really can’t do anything. I can put the complaint in.

Kyle

Oh no! When the IT guys have gotten used to viewing distorted images, what hope is there for the rest of us?

I understand it when people stretch images to fit their wide LCD/plasma screens to avoid burn in. I think this is why people aren’t bothered by CNN.com video– they’re used to seeing it at home), but it seems kind of silly when a software based media player without a fixed screen size does the same thing.

However, now I understand that you’re just streaming the content that the producers are providing in an already distorted format. But it is again kind of silly since CNN is already broadcasting in widescreen 16:9 HD, why aren’t they just providing you with 16:9 native footage?? I guess that’s not a question you’ve got the answer to, but it does seem a little absurd, don’t you agree?

Yes, please do register my complaint with the appropriate people (and spread my jpegs around the IT dept so more people see what’s happening . I very much appreciate it.

Thanks Kyle
Adam

Hey Kyle,

Just one more message and then I’ll go back into my distorted viewing corner

I found this article from 2007 (click here) which specifically cites the aspect ratio problem, and cites CNN.com specifically. So it appears that CNN.com has been doing this for quite a long time. The author illustrates precisely my point, but with the same picture. Seen side by side, the difference is pretty staggering. There’s no reason the producers should be distorting digital media like this.

OK, thanks again… I look forward to the day that cnn.com becomes stops stretching their 4:3 square peg into a 16:9 round hole!

Adam L
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No further response.

It is as the previous poster “Anonymous Coward” said…. if you’re in a sports bar and they’ve got the image distorted, it’s annoying but understandable. When it’s a major multinational media conglomerate, WHAT in the WORLD could they be thinking?

Compensation does happen since we often view our TV-s at odd angles where the ratio is not what we perceive it as.

That said it doesn’t make the choice to plain out stretch the video in this way much less horrible (only a bit less horrible).

Even weirder is this: notice the text and CNN logo are overlayed at square ratio.

It looks like this was a decision at CNN so they can transmit wide screen video on cable, and now all their archives are pre-stretched like that, hence this is how they publish it online.

I pray it’s just an artifact of transitional period as you do, and hope they’ll get it right within 1-2 years.

As for #29, there’s an awful lot of thought that went into the standards that have driven TV for many years, PAL was especially clever (as a european I have to say that). There’s never been anything stopping you use square pixels with MPEG1 or 2, and indeed non-square pixels on H264. Yes non-square pixels are an oddity, but HDTV was the right time to phase them out, given what MPEG1 and 2 were designed for, it’s not surprising that they supported non-square pixels and aspect ratios. In the UK the main broadcasters are actually very good at making sure their video is signalled correctly.

Don’t act like IT people have all the answers please, because in reality a lot of the failures you get on TV are not about broadcast equipment failing, but the computers that control them failing.

I assume it’s mostly to do with “getting your money’s worth with that wide screen”. I’ve been in several hotels recently with new 16:9 LCD televisions, but with 4:3 cable feeds. The irony is that the tv has an “autodetect aspect ratio” setting which worked properly, but the power-on default was “stretch to fit”.

Most people are used to watching movies letterboxed now; I wonder if they’ll get used to “barndoors” on older tv shows in another twenty years.

Take a picture of a person, import it into a graphics program, put a new layer over it, and trace the picture. Now withdraw the original photo. The tracing will look “wrong”. How can that be? The picture- take it yourself if you don’t trust others- looks right, the tracing looks wrong.

The good news here would be that there will always be work for illustrators who do it the old way, and your spouse will look beautiful to you as long as you love them.

We have a small LCD 16:9 screen in our kitchen. We only use it for watching local news and CNN (the big projection screen is in the bedroom for DVD movies). The cable feed is 4:3, and I leave it set on the “zoom” aspect ratio so it cuts off a little on the top and bottom, knocking out that annoying constant text crawl at the bottom.

Initially, flat (and wide) screen TVs were hyped as the best way to watch movies, but little was said about watching ordinary broadcast television on them. I remember going to a consumer electronics store where they had dozens of them showing DVDs–and one displaying a television news broadcast. On that last one, the reverse distortion was plainly visible if you looked around the edges of the image. It wasn’t that pronounced, really, but it was jarring to me, because the distortion was in the opposite direction from what I was used to seeing on TVs.

Maybe they’ve eliminated this now, but it was a real phenomenon, not just an optical illusion.

As for removing anything that can change the aspect ratio of something, doing so would prevent the proper display of nearly all DVDs. The resolution of dvd is 720×480 (though the pixels aren’t square, so it remains a 4:3 image). Widescreen movies used to (and I suppose still do occasionally, with poor quality product) acheive widescreen on 4:3 displays by matting the top and bottom of the picture. When displayed on a TV with a 16:9 aspect ratio, full zooming was required to fill the frame and acheive anything resembling the proper aspect ratio, though because of inconsistent zoom functionalities between tvs, something was usually lost in the process. So DVDs have for many years been made with anamorphically squeezed content that uses all (or in the case of wider-aspect movies, significantly more) of the vertical resolution and all of the horizontal resolution to make an image that will look right when unsqueezed by a ratio of 1.33… just like the CNN video, except it has been designed to be viewed this way.

Most TVs and DVD players default to fill the frame horizontally not to prevent burn in (most tv types don’t suffer from burn in) but to makes certain that DVDs will look right when played. You still have aspect ratio controls on your TV because there are plenty of older, non-anamorphic dvds out there. And because there’s no consistency between broadcasters with regards to how they display content, vis a vie aspect ratio (shout out to ESPN HD, who will insert into the signal animated “ESPN HD” bars around 4:3 content, mostly commercials, so that aspect ratio is preserved and burn-in isn’t a risk). And yes, also so that people who want to fill their damn screen can do so, because ignorant or not, they have every right to do whatever they please.

Now as for the stretched video on CNN… that’s just screwed up.

Why they did it, I don’t know.

I can’t answer this. I can however tell you some of how this started.
Back in the early days of digital video, given that idiots (ie TV engineers) were running the show, it was decided that wouldn’t it be cool if the same bit rate could be used for both NTSC and PAL. No problem, we can get that to work by sampling the two using different pixel aspect ratios. (For even more inexplicable reasons, neither of which is square; they are like 1.1 and 0.9 width to height.)

OK, roll on MPEG-1. Also with substantial input from the idiot TV engineers. This decides great, let’s keep this fscked up abortion of a scheme and also use non-square pixels. Back in those days (early 90s) we didn’t have them fancy graphics cards you kids are used to, and it cost cycles to rescale the video. The code I wrote for Apple to decode MPEG did actually do the rescaling, through a totally cool “1-bit” bi-linear interpolation scheme (if you just drop/duplicate pixels you see very obvious “stripes” in the video every 10 columns or so) that through fancy table lookups rolled this work into other work that also had to be done (color conversion, transfer to VRAM etc). However every competitor MPEG program I saw seemed to just ignore this, and display the material with the wrong aspect ratio; and none of the users ever seemed to complain.

Roll on MPEG-2, now with extra stupidity. Along with other brain-dead ideas in that standard, we got a new definition of aspect ratio; which still didn’t seem to get anyone to actually care about doing the job right.

And so we get to today. We finally have, in MPEG4 and H264 standards that were mostly put together by computer people, not TV people, and so aren’t completely idiotic, but we have a generation of production people in places like CNN who have just accepted this stuff all their working lives. It would be nice to believe that the people hired by CNN actually take it as one of their responsibilities to understand the technology, and figure out why what they are doing looks like crap, but what I imagine is going on is that, since the days of D1 digital, they’ve dealt with equipment and programs that display this stuff wrong, and they just assume this is the way the world is.

Heck, I have complained enough times, on this very site, about the various technical crappinesses of Flash video and the response I have always got is to shut my mouth, the rest of you think it is just fine to have video that has grossly broken audio-video synchronization, takes up far more CPU than is required, and displays ghastly blocking and ringing artifacts.

But white, though? Really? Don’t be afraid of those colors. They’ll warm your life up.

One time I saw this was at the National Design Museum in New York. It did not make me trust their taste in design…