How to view 4:3 program on 16:9 TV connected to 16:10 laptop

How can you force a 4:3 program (in this case it's All Creatures Great and Small, all originally shot in 4:3) to play in the 16:9 or 16:10 standard? The show will play on the 16:9 TV using my old ThinkPad T43, which is a 4:3 (haha, ironic) laptop, stretched to 16:9, and keeps aspect ratio, but when i hook up my T61p to the TV via VGA it does not fit to screen but maintains 4:3 ratio, i think this is because the laptop is 16:10 but there is another important thing to mention. On my T43 the program only plays in stretched 4:3 when connecting to the TV via S-Video cable, which the T61p does not have because S-video was becoming a legacy port. When the T43 is connected via VGA, it doesn't play stretched, only when using S-video.

How to stretch 4:3 to 16:9 and (hopefully) maintain aspect ratio on the T61p? I'm not wanting this for quality, just convenience since transferring the shows to the T43 via wireless or flash drive requires more unecessary effort.

 

You can't output a 4:3 signal to a 16:9 ratio and still maintain the original aspect ratio.

I think the TV is smart enough to 'know' that VGA is a 4:3 standard and you won't be able to change that on the T61p.

To simply stretch it (distort it), go into your TV's menu options and choose 16:9. But, you will be seeing a really wide reality of 'All Creatures Great and Small'.

Cheers!

 

Oh ok... i had a hint that the S-video cable was partly the reason why the T43 was outputting 4:3 to 16:9 properly.

 

Glad I've seemed to help!

But outputting 4:3 to 16:9 properly is impossible, lol.

 

Actually, stretching the image is generally concidered "improper" display, since it is warping the aspect ratio and skrewing up dimensions of things when displayed. So in other words, your computer is doing the right thing now. But yeah, there is usually a setting on a display device that will let you force override of the aspect ratio detection (most modern systems have some form of signalling over both ports) and display it stretched.

Edit:

Not true. Proper display of 4:3 content on a 16:9 or 16:10 display is done with pillarboxing (black bars on either side of the image).

 

Lol, that's exactly how it displays via VGA... I guess the only true way to do it would be to encode it again in 16:9 or 16:10 standard, but that's just too much time just for that.

 

That is not what I said though.

Just because we can use black bars to accurately display the content, doesn't mean it is using a 16:9 ratio, does it?

 

Unless the 4:3 version was captured 'loose', it would be pretty impossible to get a 16:9 version from it.

(Unless you just want to cut off heads/feet etc. or else go through the video frame by frame and cropping to the new aspect ratio per frame - but that would make for a very 'choppy' video, I would think).

Cheers!

 

it's fine, i'll just transfer the whole season to the T43 via my network.

 

Well, I wouldn't try to use a French to English dictionary to read a book written in Spanish either. But to each thier own.