A nice surprise

[rajtrip]

So I finally hooked up a CM-700 converter box to my old Series 2 tivo. Through svideo the picture was amazing, but that's not the surprise.

I started messing around with the aspect ratios, set the box to full, my tv to full and Tivo to widescreen. Woah, tivo is now recording widescreen! Better yet switching back and forth between hdtv and tivo, tivo lacks the fine detail but shows a softer picture with better contrast.

I remember reading here that it was impossible for a series 2 to output widescreen, so I am thrilled. :)

[ciper]

Whoever told you it was not possible was wrong. Even the S1 can output "widescreen" in this way. This is actually the preferred method to encode the video since no resolution is wasted on black bars.

It's even cooler when the display automatically switches between wide and normal. I learned recently this feature is broken on the TiVo HD of all things! :( http://tivocommunity.com/tivo-vb/showthread.php?t=415737

[kb7oeb]

The converter box is squishing the 16:9 picture into the 4:3 frame and your TV is stretching the 4:3 video from your tivo to 16:9 so in the end it looks normal. No magic, works with DVDs and VCRs etc.