Verizon FIOS is squeezing the picture
 

All,

Mom and I was watching the 1982 Zenith and notices that FIOS is sending down squeezed versions of the television signals of the local broadcast channels here in Pittsburgh. Is there any way to unsqueeze them? Mom is irritated by that and so am I, the only thing we can do is to switch over to our Zenith set-top box and receive the signals via antenna and selected the old 4:3 cropped function or the letterbox. I'd also like to ask, has anyone else experienced this on their FIOS or cable system? What's going on?

You are getting the 16:9 version of the programming on a 4:3 set.

I'm not familiar with the FIOS TV system but they must use a converter box of some kind?

Perhaps the FIOS box has a way to set it up for 4:3 or 4:3 Letterbox same as your over the air Digital converter?

BTW, I switched to the over that air broadcast and when I select the zoom option, "set by program," it is squeezed there too so that leads me to believe the TV stations themselves are doing in and wherever Verizon has its antenna and receiving system, it is set that way and sent down to us.

I don't know about your picture problem; but, I assume you got your Zenith console fixed? I remember you saying, awhile back, that it died. Or, did it just decide to come back to life on it's own?

As Eric H mentioned, this is almost certainly an issue with the aspect ratio settings, but it depends on exactly what the problem is. "Squeezed"-do you mean everything is tall and skinny on screen, and the whole screen has lit video with no black areas (either sides or top/bottom)? Or, are the shapes of things on-screen all OK but with black bars on all four edges? Or, is it something else?

I don't know if this applies to your FIOS box but take a look here:

http://www22.verizon.com/residential...one/127450.htm

Something like this was recently posted on the Sat Guys forum, but DISH related.
I have a simaliar problem. I can record a program from Dish HD to a DVD at SD.
It plays fine at the house, you can have the black bars or fill the screen. In my motorhome, which has matched panasonic equipment, LCD tv's, the same dvd will never zoom to fill the screen. The "zoom" just gets you where you should be letter boxed. Any other setting and you have a smaller than normal picture. I don't know the answer, but there appear to be some pieces of equipment that refuse to be compatiable with each other.

It came back to life on it's own basically. I tried another set or two using broadcast and if I select the option the station was putting out, the picture was compressed so I had to choose the 4:3 or 16:9 format manually and everything was fine. We switched to broadcast with the Zenith too and did the same thing. I think it was the stations doing it themselves and FIOS didn't catch it until the next day.

Everything was tall and skinny on the screen, like a compressed Cinemascope picture. FIOS did fix that the next day and everything is OK.

OK, it is good to know they fixed it.

The specific problem you saw can also be caused if you ever hook up a DVD player into an older TV, if the DVD player setup (the player's menu, not the menu on a disc itself) has the 16:9 mode selected. The proper setting would be "4:3 letterbox".