When I'm at restaurants with HDTV's, that are playing channels like CNN or MSNBC, the picture fills the screen as if it's an HD broadcast. It looks sharp and doesn't look stretched.

On my own TV, which is a 52" CRT, my setup has black sidebars on the analog/digital channels, and if I watch a 2:35:1 film on IFC or TCM, I get black bars on the sides and top/bottom.

I have a Motorola box with the options for 480i, 480p and Stretch. Is there a certain setting that I should choose? I've played with all of them, but they all look stretched to me. Maybe if I put it on the proper setting, it'll look normal to me once I get used to it.

The HD picture looks great, so no problems there.

Certain televisions have a "smart stretch" option, which makes the TV keep the AR of the picture center fairly accurate and just stretch the sides. That's probably what you're seeing in restaurants.

Maybe you could let the Motorola pass the material through as-is but let your TV modify the image? For letterboxed material like the movie channels you mentioned, you're better off with some sort of 'zoom' than you would be with a 'stretch'.

I believe those settings for 4:3 override on the Motorola box only apply to 4:3 programming on HD channels. At any rate, I've not been able to tell any difference from changing those settings on any channels, so I just left it at the default 480p.

As for the restaurant, the other poster is probably right, their TV probably just has a better stretch mode than yours and/or handles 480i content better in general.

Are you sure they are HDTVs in the restaurants? They might be ED plasmas. They may also be so far away that they look sharp.