From TV Station to screen, what's Tivo do in between?

[scairns]

Hi y'all,

Well, I'm sticking with the S1 Phillips Tivo (bless it's little micro chip heart), but STILL haven't purchased a BIG (read 42") screen LCD panel to replace the CRT . . . .

Part of the reticence is worry about whether the Tivo will step up to the plate and provide the picture I'm expecting, justifying the wide screen upgrade.

The S1 Tivo currently records from an original (about 4-5 year old) Foxtel box, then pumping image out to at 4:3 CRT display.
The natives have commented that many of their shows have the left and right edges shaved off, a result of 4:3 tech.

I'm pretty sure that the FOXTEL box is pumping out the whole (16:9 aspect ratio?) picture.
What I'm unsure of is . . .
- Does the Tivo pump out the full picture which is then cropped by the 4:3 CRT? or
- Does the "shaving" occur within the Tivo?

If the latter, the what resolution does the Tivo pump out?
If it's a 4:3 signal, I'm guessing that would work out to be a resolution of 640 x 480.
Upscaling that on a 1920 x 1080 screen would be by 2.25, giving a resolution of 1440 x 1080, which would not be much bigger than the current CRT display.

If the Tivo is, and can only, pump out a 4:3, signal, then there is less impetus to invest in the 42", 1920 x 1080 screen.
However, if the Tivo actually pumps out a 16:9 signal, or there is a setting that enables it to provide a 16 x 9 signal, things would be looking much brighter.

So . . . . can anyone tell me what signal the Tivo pumps, or is capable of pumping, out?
Has anyone encountered this situation and have any advice?

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Stuart.

[Skolink]

The easiest thing to do would be to set your STB to 16:9 output which will fill the screen but look squashed on a 4:3 CRT. On a Widescreen TV it will look correct. TiVo menus will look a little flattened though.
Default input/output resolution on the TiVo is 576x625, but can be set to 720x625 using palmod_config via telnet. Setting to 720 causes a flicker at the bottom of the screen on some TiVos, and can overstress the MPEG decoder chip and cause it to fail. You can add a heatsink to it though.

There is some facility on the TiVo to accept (from the STB) and to send to the TV the 'widescreen' flag/code so that theoretically they will automatically switch between 4:3/16:9. It should therefore avoid 'sidebars within letterboxing' which you sometimes see with 4:3 content. I haven't played with this myself though.