Post #1399732
2026-04-15 14:18 UTC
@beadsland Please don't ask me to remember how I acquired this information, because I don't. However: There was essentially competition between TV & movies. TV settled on an aspect ratio. Then movies started trying to make their product fit poorly on TV screens because they felt like wider aspect ratios that didn't fit well on TVs were in movies' interest. Some of those formats were as crazy as 2.76:1 for Ben-Hur (1959).
IMO, what movies really had was better resolution.
Replies (1)
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@jhv@triangletoot.party 2026-04-15 14:25
@beadsland Any effort to map aspect ratio a:b to aspect ratio c:d is going to fail, except in trivial cases. It's like mapping a globe to a map: you're SOL from the get-go. But both movies & TV eventually effectively lost to computers & just became data for corporate overlording. To return to your original point: just go look at how many aspect ratios there are & your limited options about getting it on a screen. Did it affect content? Absolutely. How? Yeah, that's a deep well.