Why are all wide screens "stretchy"?

[justinsn95]

I seem to remember way back when the first wide screen Tv's came out, they all claimed you could "see more of the whole picture". I done think ive ever once seen this work out. I have a wide Screen TV, and a big Wide screen Computer monitor. All the monitor did for me was stretch out My WOW game and make it look stupid. What i wanted out of both of these items was more total veiw. Not stretched out gayness. The stupid TV stretches out Letterbox movies to be unrecognizable. The salesman told me it would sort of "auto ajust" to whatever format i was using at the time. I thought if you were watching a widescreen format movie, that it would fill the screen of a widescreen TV. Otherwise, whats the point of buying the stupid TV? I got a big expensive Big Screen TV from Marvin Electronics and they said it would be $49.95 for a service call to come out and look at my TV to try to adjust it for me. :mad: Can anyone ansewer these questions for me? /rant off

[Kenny_Stang]

[QUOTE=justinsn95]I seem to remember way back when the first wide screen Tv's came out, they all claimed you could "see more of the whole picture". I done think ive ever once seen this work out. I have a wide Screen TV, and a big Wide screen Computer monitor. All the monitor did for me was stretch out My WOW game and make it look stupid. What i wanted out of both of these items was more total veiw. Not stretched out gayness. The stupid TV stretches out Letterbox movies to be unrecognizable. The salesman told me it would sort of "auto ajust" to whatever format i was using at the time. I thought if you were watching a widescreen format movie, that it would fill the screen of a widescreen TV. Otherwise, whats the point of buying the stupid TV? I got a big expensive Big Screen TV from Marvin Electronics and they said it would be $49.95 for a service call to come out and look at my TV to try to adjust it for me. :mad: Can anyone ansewer these questions for me? /rant off[/QUOTE]

You have it setup wrong... that's the easiest explanation.

Most games, are formatted to play in 4:3 format (normal non-widescreen monitors) so if you want it to not be stretched out, switch your screen to "normal" or non-widescreen mode and it will look fine but with the black bars on the side... now some games support widescreen resolutions (Call of Duty 2 comes to mind) and you need to go into the game setup and change the resolution to your screens size (for example my 32" Vizio displays at 1366x766) once you set this up, you play your came in full Widescreen glory without any of the stretchiness.

Now as far as movies go, it depends what formatting the movie is filmed in. If your "widescreen" is 16:9 and your movie is filmed in 16:9, then if you play the movie in "widescreen" mode you will fill the entire screen with no black bars. Now not all movies are 16:9, some of them are 4:3 aka Full Screen and some are different variations of widescreen (see url below), in those cases you will have black bars on the sides or on the top and bottom... most screens allow you to adjust to fill this area, but you'll either distort the picture making it "stretchy" or lose part of the picture by zooming in and removing the black bars.

Now 3rd, if you watch HDTV broadcast either by Cable, Sat, or OTA, you will usually fill the entire screen if the show/event you are watching is in 16:9 HD format (the standard for HDTV), or if it's not it will be in traditional 4:3 format which again will place black bars on both sides of the picture.

Here's a link that explains the different aspect ratio's and what you will see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_%28image%29

If you need more info on how to adjust your picture, read your manual. It's not really that difficult.

[jakesford]

for one, when ever you are running an LCD on a computer you should be running at the LCD's native resolution. My 20" widescreen is 1680x1050, and WoW supports this resolution, you just have to change the video settings.

There should be a setting on the monitor that tells it what to do if it recieves a different resolution. It will either add bars, or stretch. Use the bars if you don't want it stretched.

Also for some games you can have a script on the launch Icon to force the game to run at a certain resolution if the game doesn't support the widescreen.

For BF2 I have this in the target:
"C:\Program Files\EA GAMES\Battlefield 2\BF2.exe" +menu 1 +fullscreen 1 +szx 1680 +szy 1050