asprinwizard

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Hi there,

I'm not sure what I'm asking is possible but I thought this would be the place to ask. I have recently bought a vintage TV to go in the spare room. It was bought for ornamental purposes primarily but I've now got it hooked up to the Sky Q box in the kitchen. To do this the HDMI output is split and then passed through the LAN cable from the kitchen to the bedroom, then converted down to RCA using one of the standard HDMI to AV converters available online. From here it is converted to RF via a modulator and then goes to the TV. Quite a journey I admit but the results are really good, and I'm very happy.

There's just one irritation and that is that the image from the Sky Q is 16:9 and as such appears anamorphic on the TV, with the image stretched vertically. I can live with this but was wondering if there was anywhere in the conversion chain I could crop the image aspect ratio (or letterbox) so it appears correctly on the TV. I have seen that the AV to HDMI converters often have an aspect ratio switch to set the HDMI output, but it seems none of the converters going the other way have this. I guess this is typically set on the source but this is not possible with Sky Q, and in any case since the Sky Q is shared between the bedroom TV and the kitchen TV (which is 16:9) this is not feasible.

I'd therefore be interested to hear from anyone who knows of a way to do this.

Thanks in advance.
 
Ha. Thanks! That might be overkill for my little old portable TV. I might look into the RCA converters though if they are still around. I'm thinking some old home video editing equipment might offer solution. Anyone know?

Thanks again.
 
You don’t say what the TV is or how old it is, however I presume it is a CRT TV, which as DVD became popular in the 90s, most TVs had an Aspect Ratio in their settings menu (Just like modern TVs) so check this first. (If it’s older than this then the options in the above posts will be needed)

Most AV converters output RGB and/or Composite (Which even a lot of cheap TVs came with in the 90s) and will give you a much better picture than using the TV Tuner via a modulator.

Bill
 
Thanks Bill. I said vintage, that's what I meant. I believe it's 70s - a long time before any menus or anything. In fact it was before channel buttons, it has a tuning dial only. Therefore it also pre-dates composite inputs hence why I have to use RF. But it works well overall, just this issue with the aspect ratio which to be fair, is hardly the fault of the TV!

I was wondering if this might help: HDMI to Composite / S-Video Scaler | Gefen | Do the Impossible.

Perhaps I could use the overscan functionality to get the right shape and size. Any thoughts?
 
Sorry, this might be a bit late to suggest. And probably a Health & Safty No No!

But if you remove the back of the TV you should be able to find the Vertical & Horizontal controls on one of the boards - usually quite obvious to find. Feed in a 16:9 image & tweak the Vertical control until you have the correct image with black bars top & bottom.

Unfortunately you will need to have the TV powered up ........ (waits for the screams from people about getting electrocuted). Might be a bit radical but that's what I used to do as a 10 year old.
 
'And probably a Health & Safty No No!' - def a big red flag at minimum!

Joe
 
Yeah old TV sets 25,000v - 35,000v potential across the electron gun. Yup its only a few milliamps but it will still give you a hell of a belt (think similar range of Joules to an AED)

Oh and we used to send kids up chimneys, drink cholera contaminated water, had open sewers and used asbestos in just about everything, but we now realise that these things are not beneficial for longevity of life !!
 

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