4:3->16X9 with black bars...

[Electronic M]

Originally Posted by DVtyro

Broadcast and Blu-ray HD is always 16:9, which is why movies with other aspect ratios are either pillarboxed or letterboxed to form a complete 16:9 frame with black borders if needed.

Whether HDMI by itself can transport anything other than 16:9, I think yes, it can, after all my computer monitor is 16:10 and is connected over HDMI. But I think that consumer-grade devices will fit everything into 16:9 frame.

The digitizing box that I have has two explicit settings, for 4:3 and 16:9 source. If I select 4:3, it pillarboxes it into 16:9 frame, so the output is always 16:9. It seems that this is the result that you want.

12voltvids claims that his box, which is very similar to mine, but newer, outputs 4:3 as native 4:3 HD, which should be 1440x1080 with square pixels. Some of these boxes scale everything into 16:9, so if you have 4:3 source frame, it will be stretched to fill the screen, ugh.

Three fixed resolutions of these boxes, 1280x720, 1920x1080 and 1366x768 hint that they probably use hardware from decade-old TV sets. My plasma TV has native resolution of 1366x768.

Haven't watched your video, but based on the image thumbnail your unit was probably engineered and built by the same people as my unit...The remote and OSD menus on yours look identical to mine.