I don’t know what it is about television providers, but they just don’t get it. Period.
I am currently staying in a Holiday Inn. You would expect some level of clue from such a brand, but you would be disappointed. They are using LodgeNet to provide television in their rooms. LodgeNet sucks no matter how you slice it. It is horribly slow – I mean, it really shouldn’t take three or four seconds to change between analog channels. There is no decode necessary to display an analog stream so there is no need to wait for a key frame like there is with a digital stream. But if that was the only problem, I could put up with it.
In this case, I bypassed the usual “buy premium services!!!!” screen and went to the regular TV channels. Instant fail. They were all being displayed stretched. That is, the TV is 16:9 but the 4:3 analog signals are being stretched to 16:9. This is never correct, no matter what you might think. Let me repeat that. Stretching a picture to fill a screen that does not match its aspect ratio is absolutely never, under any circumstances, even if you will die if you don’t, the correct thing to do. Period. Don’t do it. No. That’s not a good reason either. Neither is that one. No, not that one either. And no, avoiding guest complaints about the TV picture being smaller than the screen is not valid either. If people would bother to explain what is going on instead of trying to make that task go away, maybe TV manufacturers would stop defaulting to enabling the stretching shit.
Now, it turns out the buttons on the side of the TV (standard LG model) allowed me to access the menu and put the aspect ratio setting to “set by program”. Now the “free TV” stuff is at least displayed correctly. But this does illustrate that the hotel has not updated their internal infrastructure to actually have wide screen or high definition signals. (The “Analog” sign upon changing channels is a dead give away there.) Still, displaying the crappy analog signals on a modern flat screen TV is still an improvement over the truly craptastic picture tube job they had the last time I was here which looked like it could support exactly 1/8 of the actual resolution of the analog signals.
I have not investigated whether the premium content displays correctly because I have no interest in purchasing any of it. There are two possibilities I can think of that happened. The first is that they replaced one or more TVs in the hotel without replacing the rest of the infrastructure and they left them all set at factor default settings. I think this is the most likely because it assumes no active actions on anyone’s part. The other is that they have the TVs configured this way at LodgeNet’s direction. Sadly, some of the documentation I’ve found on the ‘net suggests this is all too possible. Either way, it is clear the hotel has not bothered to upgrade its internal infrastructure to drive wide screen TVs correctly which is an epic fail of truly epic proportions. I mean, if you’re going to have a set top box anyway, run the entire TV system through it full time and let the box decode the signals at the correct aspect ratio, pillarboxing or letterboxing as needed, and use a high definition input to the TV for the display (you know, like HDMI).
I mean, seriously. Even the set top box from my home cable provider gets it right, once you turn on the hidden “auto pillarbox” setting at least. LodgeNet has no excuse for getting this wrong. And it is not like aspect ratios are particularly mysterious if all you’re trying to do is display a picture with the correct one.