BBC 'Safe Areas'

I wish they could do that here in the UK, the only time you see it here is on the HD channels, I could understand in the early days of Digital TV, but now considering that a fair proportion of the population receive Digital only TV, and many watch via Widescreen TV's, then you'd think we'd be taking the approach of ditching 4:3 safe zones.

This isn't as issue of technology. We could have got rid of the 4:3/14:9 safe areas on digital only channels from day one if it was. This is an issue of education. People don't/can't set their TVs up properly. All it needs is a short promo on the BBC saying "if you can't see the side of this graphic, you have your TV or digibox set up incorrectly, you prat" and maybe another saying "if this football looks like an egg, you still haven't got it right".

I say this as someone whose main (only) TV is a Sony 4:3 CRT.

Somewhat brutal, David, but it would be effective!

I continued to use my old 4:3 CRT for many years after the launch of widescreen channels by using the 16:9 letterbox mode without any issues.

When I bought a widescreen CRT in 2005 I noticed the same overscan problem as the OP, especially on BBC NC. A few googles and a £5 payment, got me the technical manual, and the code to access the installers menu. I'm no TV technician, but after a bit of trial and error I corrected the problem.

I agree that there should be a time limit set on when broadcasters continue to use 4:3/14:9 safe areas. Many popular channels (Sky1/2/3, C4/E4/More4) already assume 16:9 viewing for their DOGs, so there is no reason why this can't be extended to other graphics.

If my set is fed 16:9 PAL, the overscan area will be cropped away, as they should be. If it's fed 4:3 PAL, it still crops the overscan area before displaying it (with black borders left and right).

If it's fed 1080i/p (which is only ever 16:9), it crops the overscan area, unless I tell it I want "Screen Fit" (in which case I see black NAB borders and occasionally those black and white timecode dots).



Except that no-one really cares if the DOG is missing - I could have sworn it was in this thread, can't find it now, but an extreme example of a problem with ditching 4:3/14:9 safe areas would be if a strap declared someone as "Not guilty" and the "Not" was cut off. Less importantly, I recall the Late Night Poker graphics being rendered useless on an analogue broadcast because they didn't stick to safe areas.

Until there's a need to ditch overscan, I can't see it happening - and I can't see how such a need would ever arise.

David

PS I also remember Jeremy Clarkson getting in a couple of strippers who stayed outside the safe area box so only those watching in widescreen could see them!

The world feed of the F1 is available to broadcasters with either 4:3 safe or 16:9 safe graphics.

Not really, think of all the programmes that appear on both analogue and digital, whether first run on one or simulcast on both. Unless the broadcasters made 2 versions of every programme, one 4:3 safe and one not it couldn't be done. Far easier just to make them 4:3 safe and then lop the sides off for digital

Yep - some broadcasters run with 16:9 safe graphics - though they still take overscan of the 16:9 display into account.

These are usually countries that have switched off analogue entirely - like Sweden.

However it is notable that things like Phone Vote/Text Vote numbers are often shifted into 4:3 safe. (A few years ago Melodifestivalen had 16:9 full-width phone vote graphics for the first show - but they were 4:3 safe by show two...)



Yep - Sweden never really took to 14:9 safe - they were using 16:9 letterbox on analogue for years.

There is a lot of "history" in this. Many European countries have been broadcasting letterboxed content for years - long before widescreen outlets. The UK was 4:3 full-frame until the early 90s pretty much - and the tests the BBC carried out in the early 90s suggested that 16:9 letterboxing would not be accepted by the public, but 14:9 would be, though sport was considered separately.

This research was the thinking behind 14:9 letterbox - and why the BBC used it on analogue (unlike other European broadcasters. I think SVT trialled it but stopped using it quite a while ago - long before they switched off analogue)

The large number of 4:3 centre-cut receivers - and the belief that the UK public don't like letterboxing are presumably behind the preservation of 4:3 graphic safety. (Even 14:9 safe graphics are within the 4:3 centre-cut aperture - though not overscan safe on 4:3 receivers)

Yes, my Sony Bravia's factory default is a slight overscan even on HDMI inputs, which rather makes a nonsence of having a native resolution of 1080 x 1920.

You have to set to 'Full Pixel' mode in the screen settings. Of course then you see other gunk, such as a 1 or 2 pixel wide border of the background scene, when a DVE transition is about to be fired off !

There's also a permanent black bar on the right hand side about 16 pixels wide on ITV HD, that has its own thread on Digital Spy !

I read somewhere on here once that the BBC settled on the 14:9 LB compromise by running a Saturday night's BBC One output through an ARC, and judging the number of complaints. Presumably there were none!

Many Freeview boxes will, if you tell them you've got a 4:3 display, give you a 14:9 letterboxed output. But then there's the large number of Sky boxes which are set up in 4:3 centre cut-out mode. (I wonder if that was a decision made in a hurry, or something they had in mind as a way to drive sales of HD boxes, once they'd been invented?)

Kind of, I think they broadcast some popular shows in 14:9 over a few weeks. I remember Noels House Party being one of them. I don't know whether they were made in 16:9 and ARCed or just the normal 4:3 programmes with fake letterboxing

Apparently "97% of viewers either didn't notice or didn't really mind"
Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJCIMHxQhC8

Well along a similar theme, this was debated on the BBC Press Red Blog couple of months back on Red Button and Widescreen.

And in my opinion I think that any switchover to 16:9 should be done in stages so that
1 - at the end of the year all channels switch to 14:9 and
2 - by the end of 2013 over a year after DSO has been completed all stations should be broadcasting for 16:9 viewers/audiences with regular updates to remind viewers to change their settings.