My understanding might be wrong, or there might be something daft about my setup, so I'm hoping someone can clarify my situation.
I recently bought a Humax FVP-5000T to watch live TV in the UK, but of course to also have access to "catch-up" apps, and I was happy to have the media sharing feature too, to access media on my home NAS - a feature not available on the alternative Manhattan set-top boxes.
First off, I've discovered that since the end of September, the ITV Hub catch-up player no longer works on this FVP-5000T device. For that reason alone, I'm probably going to return it if I can.
But what I'd like to ask about here is the picture that the FVP-5000T is sending to my TV. Well, not to my TV actually - because I don't have a TV - but rather to my computer monitor. (I have an optical cable going from the FVP-5000T to a soundbar for the audio). My monitor is an EIZO CS2410, with native resolution 1920 x 1200. And the picture on it confuses me - it appears to be too small and the wrong aspect ratio. I'm going to try to include some photos I took, to show what I see.
The settings on my Humax box are as follows:
Screen Ratio: 16:9
Display Format: Auto
SD Output: Off
Last night I was watching BBC One HD. Since it's a HD channel, I was expecting a picture measuring 1920x1080 to be sent from the Humax box to my monitor, but the picture that appears on the monitor is not the full width of the screen at all (there are black bars on either side), and everything is vertically stretched. In the Humax box settings, if I set 'Screen Ratio' to 4:3, then the "stretching" effect is gone, but now I have black bars both on the sides as well as above and below the Freeview picture.
The monitor itself has some scaling options, also shown in a photo, and the above experience was with the default setting, 'Aspect Ratio'. It appears that in this mode, the monitor scales the input as large as possible, without changing its aspect ratio. When I set the monitor to 'Dot by Dot', the Freeview picture is tiny (and still vertically stretched)! Again, if I set the Humax box to 4:3, with this monitor scaling option, I get a tiny picture, but without the vertical stretching. This all indicates to me that the Humax box is not sending a HD picture to the monitor at all - even though I was watching BBC One HD.
When I set the monitor's scaling option to 'Full Screen', the Freeview picture looks basically as I expect it to, filling the monitor screen, but I wouldn't have thought I'd have to get the monitor to upscale/stretch the picture; surely the Humax box should just send a HD picture down the HDMI cable - without the weird vertical stretching effect that I see.
What's going on? Why does BBC One HD not appear to be HD at all? And why does the Humax box send this vertically-stretched picture to the monitor?
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