Ever since widescreens appeared, botched up aspect ratios have only gotten more and more common. Go into any restaurant, for example, and if they have TVs up (an annoying practice anyway), chances are 50/50 it'll be displaying an image bizarrely distorted by stretching/squishing, or an image with big black borders on all four sides (which I'm going to call "double-letterboxed", because that's what's happening).
This is two-thousand-goddamn-twelve. In this age of palm-sized supercomputers and HD, that's just inexcusable. Especially considering how simple it would have been to avoid.
Since industry can't seem to get it right, I'll spoon-feed them the solution they should have been able to standardize on from day one of the first widescreen TV:
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Your video feeds support metadata. Even over-the-air broadcasts. If you know how to stick copyright flags and program information into a video stream (and for the record, you do), then you already know how to embed an aspect ratio. Do it, if you're not already. And standardize the damn thing, if it isn't already.
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When the video feed changes to a different aspect ratio, change the damn aspect ratio information.
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From the original video author's desktop to the user's home system, do NOT fuck with the aspect ratio. Do NOT change the aspect ratio flag. Do NOT letterbox the feed. Do NOT crop the feed. And for the love of god, do NOT stretch/squish the feed non-uniformly.
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A TV should already know its own dimensions. It's not as if they're ever going to change. So when it receives video, have it UNIFORMLY scale the video so that one dimension matches the screen, and the other dimension is smaller than the screen and centered.
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If you must, let the user optionally choose "crop" (the same as above, but using the other dimension to match to the screen) or "stretch" (ie, non-uniform scale-to-fit). But don't make that stupid shit the default. It should never be the default. Never, never, never.
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What you say? Non-digital, non-smart TVs? Simple: Any device that outputs to a TV - a cable box, digital tuner, DVD player, game console, whatever - is told by the user what aspect ratio their screen is. Show them a square and a circle to make sure their choice is correct. Better yet, show them various squares/circles/rectangles/ellipses, and when they choose which pair looks like a square and circle: Guess what? You know their aspect ratio!
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To minimize user setup and screwup, set-top boxes (whatever set-top box it may be) should attempt to auto-detect whether the screen handles aspect ratios on its own and, if not, what aspect ratio the screen is. Do NOT make assumptions. Whenever there's any doubt, don't pull a "salesman" and grab an answer out of your ass: Have the user choose their own "square and circle".
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What? Auto-detect? Yes. Even VGA had ways to send monitor information to the source device. Surely HDMI and DVI should be capable of the same. And if RCA cables are being used, that just means you're back in user-selection land.
So there. You've now been told how to not fuck up aspect ratios, so after years of shitty distorted and double-letterboxed video feeds, let's start getting it right.
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