Widescreen on chorus digital??

ixtlan

I am thinking of getting my mother a new larger screen TV...

She currently has analog chorus analogue MMDS with a 21", but it's likely she will upgrade to Chorus digital... Personally I have Sky, but she does want UTV/C4 and also might use the analog box in another room...

My first thought was to get a cheap 29" 4/3 TV, but then I started thinking about whether a widescreen TV might be better. For Chorus analogue nothing I can see is widescreen. Is Chorus digital different? If not then there would be no benefit to widescreen.

It also occurred to me that I might buy myself a new 32" widesceen and give mum my 2 year-old but very good Sony 29" 4/3.... since for a Sky user there's a lot of widescreen programming.

Sky is rapidly switching everything to widescreen but Chorus(and even RTE) seems a lot slower.

Ix.

channelsurfer

The only widescreen chorus do is the rebroadcast of bb3 bb4 bbc news 24 sky1 etc on their system you can set the box to widescreen ie anamorphic widescreen but the box most of the time if you power it off will switch back to 4:3 aspect for these channels.. for the terresterial bbc1 and rte etc its just the same as the terrestrial feed that the uk get ie in 14/9 .with narrow black lines on the screen for most of the programmes.
hope that helps..

jimbob

As Channel surfer said,
The terresterial channels on Chorus Digital are not Widescreen.
I think it has to do with the fact that the BBC have no text on their digital channels and they wanted text at Chorus, so they are getting the analogue feed. this would make sense.
Plenty of the channels have widescreen.
Sky news is not widescreen.
Sky channels have widescreen programs. Sky1, Skysports, Sky movies
The adds are not widescreen. not all programs are wide.

E4, all BBC's other than the 1, 2, even QVC, attheraces are widescreen channels. Permanently widescreen even the adds in widscreen.
Bit wierd that big brother was not widescreen though.

The other channels such as discovery, paramount are not in widescreen.
They are not in Widescreen on sky either.

Had chorus digital for about 5 months before i found the widescreen option.
The engineer never said anything. Maybe he didn't know either.
I was messing about with installation menu and found it.
Its great cause you get to see more of the picture.
On a 4:3 tv you only see the centre of the picture, missing the parts on the left and right. Hav you ever noticed those films with the credits missing on the left and right. Well not any more.

celticfc

jimbob wrote:

As Channel surfer said,
I think it has to do with the fact that the BBC have no text on their digital channels and they wanted text at Chorus, so they are getting the analogue feed. this would make sense.

No, ntl digital gets the digital feed for BBC One, BBC Two, UTV & Channel 4 all in widescreen & they all have teletext.

jimbob

When did NTL put teletext on their Digital Service.
I understood there was no teletext on their digital service, and that you had to go back to your analogue to get text. I have seen this.

When did that change?

celticfc

jimbob wrote:

When did NTL put teletext on their Digital Service.
I understood there was no teletext on their digital service, and that you had to go back to your analogue to get text. I have seen this.

When did that change?

About a year now. It's only available on the first 8 channels though (i.e. the Irish & UK terrestrials).

I'm not sure if it's available on all boxes and software versions though.