I have "Basic Cable Service", "Signature Cable Service" and "Converter Rental" from RCN. The converter is an SD-only Motorola box which RCN rents me for $2.95 a month. It outputs composite video to an old 4:3 cathode ray tube television.
The only thing I use this service for is NESN as there seems to be very little else on TV these days I want to watch besides baseball. On Tuesday or Wednesday this week suddenly RCN's SD feed started to be broadcast with a distorted aspect ratio -- the video is a 16:9 signal that is now being stretched to 4:3 making the players look like El Greco characters and the baseball like an ellipsoid. You can see a photo here:
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I have circled the distorted baseball. This is not a problem on any other channel. ESPN and FX, for instance, properly show letterboxing, so my TV (which is old, as I said, and has no configurable aspect ratio) is not causing the problem. Here's another example: You can see that the video is stretched but the "information band" that RCN displays along the bottom is not.
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I called customer support and complained, and they said they "could not reproduce it" there. Since the converter box had also been kind of glitchy and had been losing all audio after a couple of hours of use, they agreed to send a tech out to replace the box. A tech came yesterday and did so, and confirmed that the video was still distorted on NESN and NESN only and my TV was not at fault. (The glitchy audio seems to have been fixed by the new box, so that's an improvement.) The tech said he would call around to see if something had been done to the video feed recently.
Can RCN please fix the distorted aspect ratio on their NESN SD feed? RCN charges quite a lot for this fairly basic cable service and if they cannot provide a clean NESN feed I'm going to have to drop the service or switch to another provider, despite liking RCN's internet service. I find aspect ratio distortions in video to be extremely distracting, so much so I sometimes have trouble recognizing people on-screen. If this is problem on NESN's side and cannot be fixed, at least let me know.
I'm not sure if it matters, since my internet connection is working fine, but my encoded MAC address is b307450177f344952c7bafa11b3e438eaad21c50.
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