Will (Can) Boxee support 4:3 TVs on appleTV?

[danny_w]

I know that the Apple TV does not itself support 4:3 aspect ratio tv sets. Will Boxee have this support? Is there some setting somewhere, or does Boxee depend on the resolution setting in Apple TV?

[bsab]

My buddy uses his appletv on a 27" 4:3 crt TV, no problems at all.

[jgw1977]

Dito for me as well! As in it works for me!

[bsab]

I think as long as your TV has component video inputs then you are good to go.

[danny_w]

My tv does have component inputs, but the standard AppleTV firmware assumes a widescreen display so that everything that is displays appears "squashed"; it is basically unuseable for vide because of this distortion. So are you saying that Boxee doesn't have this problem and can be set to expect a 4:3 display?

[bsab]

Try setting your appletv to 480i, that might fix your problem.
My friend does not have boxee nor any other hack on his appletv. I have not seen anything squashed on his tv. The menu text isn't crisp, but other than that everything seems fine for a standard definition TV.

[danny_w]

Nope, that doesn't work. The ATV always assumes a widescreen display regardless of the setting. Try syncing a movie (any kind, but 4:3 shows it the worst) and then try to play it. For some reason *some* of the iTunes purchasd videos look pretty good, but are still not perfect.

[bsab]

I'm not sure what you can do then. All I can say is I've seen it work with backed-up DVD's, photo slideshows, youtube and Apple movie trailers.
Do some research on google, there is lots of information on this topic.

[murphysm@photokiva.com]

I have an AppleTV and am using it on a 27" standard def tv. I found that in the menu's on the tv there is an option to choose the Video format (or something to that extent) and you can choose between 4:3 format or 16:9 format. I've found when I set the tv itself to 16:9 format the videos in ATV look great! When viewed in 4:3 mode they look squished.

See if your tv has settings like that. I've been much happier since discovering that!

[danny_w]

I have an AppleTV and am using it on a 27" standard def tv. I found that in the menu's on the tv there is an option to choose the Video format (or something to that extent) and you can choose between 4:3 format or 16:9 format. I've found when I set the tv itself to 16:9 format the videos in ATV look great! When viewed in 4:3 mode they look squished.

See if your tv has settings like that. I've been much happier since discovering that!
No, my tv has no such settings, which is the whole problem. I finally gave up and restored the ATV to factory settings (it restored to v1.0 firmware) and used displayconfig to add a 4:3 setting to the ATV menu. Now everything works great. Of course I only have the original capabilities, but that is enough for me (for now at least). The only thing that I am really missing is the capability to sort by genre.

[ShakeBobWillis]

I'm using Boxee via Apple TV v2.2 with a 7 year old 36inch Sony Wega (via component inputs). While using Apple TV directly I had to select the 480! and things did appear squished, but you can check your settings on the TV itself, it might have an enchanced widescreen option, use that. It fixes the Apple TV display and some videos.

Use Boxee rather than the ATV software and you don't have to use the TV setting for enchanced widescreen (or if you don't have that at all then this is even better anyway) Put the ATV resolution at 480i. Then go into Boxee, use the settings menu to calibrate the screen. Settings->Appearance->Screen.
Go to Video Calibration and bring the corners of the screen into view. It starts with the top left corner (Just in case the instructions are cut off on the screen...when I first did it they were partially cut off in the corner becuase the screen was too wide). Use the Apple remote directional to bring the triangle into view. When you have it in the screen hit the select (middle) button and it goes to the bottom right corner. Do the same thing and get the triangle onto the screen. Then hit select again, and adjust so the subtitles will show up on the screen. The final measurement is to resize the cube that pops up in the middle of the screen so that it is a perfect square.

Once I calibrated the screen I have no stretching whatsoever. 4:3 display. (Obviosuly widescreen bars for widescreen movies).