I bought some new TV gear (some Ikusi modulators, amplifiers, etc pulled from a small hotel) to run my own personal (self-contained) cable TV service.

The issue is do I encode all my digital files for square pixel PAL (768x576) or non-square pixel PAL (720x576)? I've no idea how they will look on an acutal TV set until I get the gear next week, so I've made a couple of test vids; one for each.

I'll play them both at the same time on separate channels and see the results.

L: 768
R: 720

PAL TVs don't have square pixels so I'm gonna do this experiment to see if I need to account for that or not.

For example if I throw a square pixeled video at an actual CRT through UHF how is it going to look compared to the non-square pixel video?

@renbymon Hmm, if you're going to do it as an analogue PAL signal it shouldn't make a lot of difference as it doesn't have "pixels" anyway? I would think it only makes a difference where the digital file gets converted into a 625-line PAL signal, and would basically only affect how faithfully any high-frequency components of each line get reproduced. As long as the digital decoder/PAL encoder gets the horizontal size right (stretching the pixels in the input to the correct length of output signal) you should get more or less the same result, wouldn't you? Not sure I'm explaining very well.
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@pippin Oh I guess so! I wasn’t sure really, but I’d like the videos to be as native as possible. The kit has arrived anyway so I’ll see how it looks on actual hardware in the next few days. :)

@renbymon Oh nice! Expect lots of "fun" with getting interlacing right! ;)
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