I'm sorry to post here but I don't know who else to ask. We (my 85 year old mother and I) are just so frustrated and neither of us can figure this out. It's about buying big screen TV's (monitors in my case) and having up to 1/3 of it wasted black screen. We experienced this frustration years ago when HD was a new thing, and we learned quickly that channels/streamer's that were in HD usually had no wasted screen, but others did. So we were okay for awhile (years).

Now the issue is back. Is it because 4K is a thing now? What's the fucking point of spending hundreds of dollars on a big screen TV if a great chunk of it is wasted black space? Dammit this is frustrating. I know there are "tricks" to try, the same ones we tried before, that basically force changes the screen to a different resolution. I don't need to tell you how... unsatisfying that generally is as things then often look.... "stretched" for lack of a better word.

What I'm asking is if someone can just explain to me WTF is the reason behind this, not necessarily offer tips on fixing it. But there are four screenshots below from a series I watched on Amazon Prime (Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan). The first two are from Season 1. The 1st is the opening page of season 1 with what I guess might be important info circled) and the second is from the show itself. As you should be able to see, it is full screen and looks good. It is also from 2018.

The third screenshot is the opening screen for season 3 with the same info circled (and maybe I looked over it too fast but all the letters look exactly the same to me) and the fourth screenshot is from the show itself in season 3 and... black lines across the top and bottom that combined I know take up more than a fifth of the screen and perhaps as much as a third.

WTF is the difference? Same computer, same monitor, taken minutes apart and verified twice. I watch season 1 (2018) and it uses the whole screen.... I watch season 3 and it doesn't. And this repeats on our 50 inch TV in the living room on nearly every channel. We watch only the HD channels (on XFinity) but when we watch movies on HBO, Showtime, Epix... ALSO IN HD, boom.... big wasted screen space.

WHy?

There's nothing wrong with your TV or with the video, it's the way it was filmed and made. Just like screens can have different aspect ratios, so can content. You know those two black bars you see when you play old games on a modern widescreen display? It's the same with the videos, but the bars are horizontal.

Okay..... but if I'm not mistaken HD (and 4K) are the same aspect ratio, right? HD is 1920X1080 and 4K is twice that I guess (3840X2160 if I doubled them correctly. Both seasons are listed as being in UHD (which is 4K, is that right?)

So the aspect ratio should be the exact same in both, yet one is full screen and one is not. What am I missing about the term "aspect ratio"?

ADDED:

From wikipedia:

Ultra-high-definition television today includes 4K UHD and 8K UHD, which are two digital video formats with an aspect ratio of 16:9.

16:9 is the same ratio for HD. (1920X1080)

Is your problem the black bars at the top and bottom? I think that's just how they're made because they aren't going for a 16:9 but rather a 16:10. If that's such a big deal, maybe stretch the picture? It's what I do with DVDs just so I can fill out the screen, but not sure if you can do that with Amazon Prime or other streaming services.

But movies and sometimes shows are shot using a different, wider (edit: well, usually), aspect ratio.

I agree with InkPanther. It's not the TV, and it's probably not the player either, rather it is filling as much of the screen with the video (which you can tell isn't wasted because the GUI/controls are present).

While the screen MAY be 16:9, it may be different resolution ratio.

Not only that, sometimes movies/shows may just add black bars on the top/bottom for cinematic reasons, then remove it later. Resolutions on laptops are known to be odd too for 'ultrawide'. It's not like those take anything to compress, they just don't set right when zooming depending on where the actual side(s) are.

Well, again, both seasons (actually all three seasons) are listed as being in UHD which is 16:9 ratio.

I remember in the "old days" when this problem surfaced we could tell when there was going to be a problem because a program would be listed as SD (which left lines on the left and right IIRC) or LB (letterbox) and those had the black lines across the top and bottom. But in this case (and in the case of movies on HBO etc.) they are all listed as being in HD or UHD, both 16:9 ratios, yet some are full screen and some have the black lines.

Both season one and season three are listed as being in UHD which is 16:9 (which the table posted above also clearly shows in addition to the wikipedia quote. Yet both seasons are listed as being in 16:9 ratio, but one season has full screen (the one made in 2018) and one has the blank space (the one made in 2022).

And no, it was not temporary. I watched all episodes in all three seasons and in all in season one I get full screen and in season 3 in all I get wasted space.

I guess I'm not going to find an answer but I appreciate those that did reply. Thank you and Happy New Year.

UHD doesn't mean that the movie is going to be 16:9.

I think most movies and TV shows shot today are in 21:9 ratio
[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21:9_aspect_ratio]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21:9_aspect_ratio[/url]

It's normal. Films can be shot with a number of different aspect ratios. In other words the width to height ratio varies. There is no one standard dimension for all films. It's not practical to have different TVs of different dimensions per movie. So the black bars are necessary. In theaters they can often cover the top and bottom of the screen custom per movie with a curtain so you don't notice this.

One nice thing about it though is if you use subtitles they can often go in the bottom black area and not cover the picture much.

UHD is the resolution of the video but not the aspect ratio of the film that the video frame contains. So 2 videos can have the same resolution but contain films that have different aspect ratios.

Look here for an example:
https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Star-Wars-Episode-IV-A-New-Hope-4K-Blu-ray/257142/

You'll notice it is a 4K (UHD) video which is a 16:9 aspect ratio. But the video's frame contains a film that has an aspect ratio of 2.39:1 and so they don't match. Thus you'll see every screen grab has black bars on the top and bottom. For this not to be the case your TV and the video would need to have the same aspect ratio (2.39:1) as the film but then you'd have bars on the sides when you watched a 16:9 film. So there's no way to avoid this with a single display size and multiple film sizes.

16:9 was chosen as the standard for most displays and videos because it is a compromise between the various film sizes out there.

Aspect ratios are an arbitrary artistic choice, not an actual standard. And a lot of them weren't made with addressable picture elements in mind, but electron guns and analogue scanning beams stimulating arbitrary phosphor grids.

The space isn't "wasted," but rather "unused"...the screen is showing as much of the image as it can, there's simply nothing to put in the "black bar" areas. Because (as has been stated) the aspect ratio is wider than your screen. Aside from stretching or cropping the image, which you wisely said you don't want to do, there's nothing to fix. Unless you can convince everyone on the planet to settle on a single aspect ratio, this won't change.

You can always get a wider screen, but then you'd have black bars at the sides instead of top and bottom for shows where the aspect ratio is less wide. Also there are shows such as The Expanse that don't have a constant aspect ratio. Seasons 1-3 are 16:9, but season 4 varies between 2.35:1 (the planet-side scenes) and 16:9. The remaining seasons are variably 2:1 and 2.35:1. So unless there are TVs that physically change size, there will always be black bars, so you might as well just get used to it. Honestly I don't even notice anymore, and I don't even have that big of a screen.

Projectors. That's the only thing that may 'change size', though it will still have a maximum size limit it can project to.


But they pretty much did, twice. For CRT SD we had 4:3, and now more recently 1080p (or rather 16:9). As I'm sure 95% of the HD screens are 1920x1080 for the resolution. This is likely also heavily depending on what the encoding standard was for broadcasting over the air, and the resolution in the standard was taken verbatim as they had to support it.

But yes, there's no ratio that's going to be used 100% of the time, so there's going to be something that doesn't fit.

Short answer - S1 was filmed in 16:9 (widescreen) and S3 was probably filmed in 21:9 (aka 2.35:1 or Ultrawide):-

- If you watch 16:9 content on a 16:9 screen or 21:9 content on an 21:9 Ultrawide, it will fill the screen.

- If you watch 21:9 content on a 16:9 screen, it will be letterboxed (black bars top & bottom).

- If you watch 16:9 content on a 21:9 Ultrawide screen, it will be pillarboxed (black bars at the sides).

You'll see the same thing when watching widescreen content on old 4:3 TV's (letterboxed) or when playing older 4:3 video games on widescreen monitors (pillarboxed).

I found a nice picture showing the most common image formats and how they translate from one screen size to another.

https://www.chimerarevo.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/proporzioni-in-base-al-video.jpg


Most TVs have an option to zoom in, meaning that the black bars vanish, but you loose a part of the image either on top and bottom (as shown in the attachment), or left and right if you do it the other way around (wide image, 4:3 screen)