Apple TV won't show 16:9

The tv only outputs video at 16:9, it will not be the cause of your display showing 4:3.

Firstly are you sure the content isn't 4:3, the tv will take this content and display it at the correct aspect ratio by adding grey bands to each side of the picture to fill out the 16:9 display.

If your content is 16:9, your issue lies either with your encoding or the tv and/or its connections.

I recently had a similar problem and thought ATV was the cause. But on further troubleshooting, I found the problem was the TV. Someone had accidentally changed the "aspect ratio" on the TV--easy to do by pressing the wrong button on the remote.

You may want to check the TV settings to see the aspect is set to 16:9. I think some TVs also allow different inputs to have different aspect ratios, so check the settings for your ATV input.

P.S. The previous poster is correct, ATV only outputs in 16:9; so on a SDTV that's 4:3 the picture looks skinny and tall, but on an HTDV it will fill the entire screen.

1st of all, the Apple TV IS capable of putting out 4:3. It is an option in the display resolution menu. I am not an Apple TV noob

Please enlighten us all, can you show us a photo of this option.

480p is NOT a widescreen format.

True

That Is standard definition 4:3

Not quite true.

480p refers not to the horizontal picture dimensions but to the number of horizontal lines of resolution and can indeed be any width at all, but in the case of the tv is 853 pixels wide thereby maintaining a 16:9 AR.

If your media file is 640 x 480 (4:3), the tv will add pixels (grey band) to each side and display the media in the centre of the screen.

If your tv is 4:3 and not 16:9 the output will still be the same from the tv but the picture will be compressed horizontally.

Without hacks, selecting 480p on the tv will result in a 16:9 output.

The

Brendan09 wrote:
Here is an article: http://www.kashum.com/blog/1176709841
480p is NOT a widescreen format. That Is standard definition 4:3.

That's not strictly true.

If you take that stance, then NTSC DVD players outputting a progressive signal could ONLY output 4:3 not 169, and PAL ones at 576p could only be 4:3 too.

There's more to it when you add anamorphic encoding/pixel aspect ratios to the equation.

The 480/576p signal just refers to the number of lines - how they are displayed will depend on the output device and the display device. They don't always work perfectly together as much as we'd like them too.

Are you sure it's not the TV 'Zoom' options.

I can force a 16:9 image to display at 4:3 on some of my TVs using the Aspect ratio/Zoom button.

It depends on the TV Set of course, but for example on my Panasonic sets I can choose

Auto - which often gets things wrong.

16:9 - which treats the signal as though it's 16:9

4:3 - treats the signal as 4:3 - so if it is a wide 16:9 video/broadcast with a 4:3 image and black bars either side, then using this forces it to narrower than 4:3. This setting is useful when broadcasters transmit 4:3 but without flagging as such so the TV stretches it to 16:9, and I hate that.

Zoom 1-3 - various zooms that zoom or distort the image and reduce quality bt remove black bars. Hate thse options usually.

It may not be your zoom settings of course, but as an earlier poster said it's certainly something to check out.

Good luck.

AC

4:3 option also squishes what should be displayed 16:9 so that there are black bars either side.

This (discussing DVD) is fairly thorough - you may know the details already, but if not worth a look:

http://trac.handbrake.fr/wiki/AnamorphicGuide

Just a thought, but could umplugging your Tv have reset various TV display settings - not all TVs show 4:3 stuff with grey bars, but some that do are configurable from black to almost white - could it have reset grey side bars to black and caused confusion?