Comment by lathiat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lathiat | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I also enjoy every streaming service solving many technical problems the others have already solved.

The most painful one for me right now is that Paramount+ has all their videos rendered with black bars top and bottom. So when I watch the latest Star Trek New Worlds and Star Trek Discovery on my 34" 1440p ultrawide, it literally has a black border all the way around the edge. Watching the same episode on Prime Video, it entirely fills my screen.

I've reported this to them a couple times over a year and they haven't done anything about it. I imagine, most likely, this is possibly some kind of combination of compatability with some devices that need videos rendered at a certain resolution and not wanting to have too many different encodes of videos. But it is quite annoying not to be able to have the video fill my screen.

Isn't that just a regular aspect ratio issue? If the content is filmed in 1:2.4 and you're trying to watch it on a 16:10 screen, it's always going to be letterboxed.

In that case, if it doesn't look letterboxed then it's either stretched (deformed) or parts of the video are cropped/lost.

I think they're saying that the base content _itself_ has the letterbox "burned in", so that when they watch it on their TV (with an wider ratio) it has black borders on all four sides - at the sides because of ratio mismatch, and at the top and bottom because they're present in the base media.

This is correct. There’s a total black border on all 4 sides. Because the black bars are rendered into the top and bottom of the video. On a 1080p display it full screens fine but with a display with the native wide screen aspect of the actual video I can’t actually have it fill the screen.

But only on paramount+

This used to be a problem with VHS/DVDs when widescreen TVs first came out. TVs often (and maybe still do) had a mode to zoom in to cut them off.

People expect black bats on the top or the sides but not both.

If it's "both" someone somewhere messed up, if you're in the 99.x% of users not experimenting with aspect ratios or resolutions.

It is both :)

The problem is the black bars top And bottom are rendered into the video. I happen to have a 34” ultra wide which is the native aspect of the actual video. But I can’t actually watch it full screen. But only on paramount+. Works fine on Amazon.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com