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?

Oh also "why do this?"

1) It's interesting technology and I'm nerdy for it

2) I don't watch broadcast TV anymore because (despite the hundreds of channels) there's nothing I would want to watch at the time i want to watch it, and also I'm fed up with streaming.

I want something good to watch and it be in rotation so I don't have to choose. If I'm forced to choose I end up watching a documentary for the tenth time instead of something else I've got waiting.

I want some semblence of old style British analogue TV back and as I can't get it anywhere else I'm going to make it myself.

With the four modulators that I have I'm thinking of recreating something akin to the viewing habits I had on early Sky TV:

A channel of kids shows/cartoons during the day and movies in the evening (Cartoon Network & TNT)
A channel of scifi programs and more adult anime (Sci-Fi Channel/Bravo)
A general entertainment channel (Sky One)
A documentary channel (History)

@renbymon this sounds similar to something I saw on hackaday a while back.
https://hackaday.com/2023/07/13/recreating-the-golden-era-of-cable-tv/

Not sure how close that is to what you're picturing, but it might have some useful bits you can adapt.

@garrwolfdog I had forgotten about this! I think it did spark something but I was a little disappointed that they didn’t share their code for the project.