Cable TV apect ratio??

[Mitchel]

I rave the RR-C hooked up to a feed from my local cable company and when I set video tools to display the "source" aspect ratio it gives me a picture that is 688x470. Is this correct? I thought that broadcasts were supposed to be coming in in a 4x3 aspect ratio. I can manually set the aspect ratio to 4x3 but I'm just curious about the source.
~Mitchel

P.S. I live in the states so this is a ntsc signal.

[fluggo99]

No, cable NTSC TV is still 4x3. The difference is in your capture card, which stretches the pictures wider when it captures them. It's meant to catch more detail when you're doing video editing.

[Michel Carleer]

In the CCIR standards (MPEG1, MPEG2, ...), a pixel has a width and a height which are different. I don't remember the aspect ratio of a CCIR pixel, but it is not 1. Also, it is probably different for NTSC and for PAL, or for a movie.
Michka