The squished iPlayer picture on my Sony TV

4 January 2025 • 4 min read

I was recently using the iPlayer app on my Sony A84L Google TV. I noticed something odd: people were looking rather slim.

Here’s an example from BBC series Asia:

Sir David Attenborough is squished. But, conversely, the BBC logo in the corner is stretched, and positioned more to the left than it should be.

Clearly, such scaling makes no sense for natively widescreen content¹. You also can’t access display settings while in the iPlayer app, so it’s not at all clear how to fix this.

Thankfully, the internet has some clues. First, Sony and the BBC have articles hinting at the problem:

• Why is playback cropped or zoomed-in on my Sony TV? | iPlayer help
• How to solve: BBC iPlayer picture is cropped and the full image isn’t being displayed | Sony UK

Second, there are various forum threads discussing the problem. Here are a couple:

• Sony A8 BBC iplayer UHD images seem stretched/ jelly effect | AVForums
• Sony A80J BBC iPlayer/Youview Catch up Issues - Sony

Only the AVSForum thread accurately describes the non-uniform distortion of the picture.

The Sony support article makes the solution sound simple. But when it says ‘Launch your TV app to watch broadcasted [sic] content’, the discussion online suggests that it specifically means TV via the built-in tuner (using an aerial).²

I didn’t have an aerial connected, so I bought a cheap indoor aerial and managed to tune a few channels in. I switched the TV to one of those channels and checked the Display area setting. To my surprise, it was already set to +1. I checked iPlayer again, and the picture was still distorted. I tried changing the Wide mode setting to Full instead of the default (which I think was Auto). That didn’t help either. I fiddled around with various other settings, but with no luck.

I parked the problem until today. I reconnected the aerial, switched to an SD digital TV channel and changed the Display area setting from +1 to Normal and opened up iPlayer. I played the same episode of Asia I had used to test earlier. It was still distorted.

I then went back to the digital TV channel, changed the Display area setting to +1, and played Asia in the iPlayer app again. To my surprise, the picture was no longer distorted:

Here’s how it looks in the Sky Q iPlayer app, as a comparison:

That certainly looks promising. I then switched my TV back to the HDMI input for my Sky Q box (which is assigned as the primary TV input on the TV) and played Asia on the iPlayer app on the TV once more. To my dismay, it was back to being distorted.

The logical conclusion is that the problem also depends on which input is active when the iPlayer app is launched in some capacity. With the Sky Q box set to 2160p, the Display area and Wide mode settings are unavailable on the TV. So I changed my Sky Q box to output 576p, changed Display area to +1 on the TV, and fired up the iPlayer app. I now had more of the picture, but it was still distorted (albeit slightly less obviously, as the logo had moved in a bit).

I then went back to the HDMI input for the Sky Q box, changed Wide mode to Full and fired up the iPlayer app once more. Success. It was back to being undistorted and uncropped. I set my Sky Q box back to 2160p, and checked the iPlayer app again. It was still undistorted and uncropped.

As a final test, I turned on my Nintendo Switch, switched over to that HDMI input and fired up the iPlayer app and played Asia again. It was distorted.

So, in summary, if you have this problem:

• you probably don’t need to get an aerial to fix it if you don’t have one
• the behaviour depends on which input is in use when iPlayer is launched
• getting an undistorted and uncropped picture specifically seems to need Display area set to +1 and Wide mode set to Full for a lower-resolution video mode such as 576i, 576p or 720p³ on the input in use when iPlayer is launched
• this is definitely nonsensical behaviour of the TV (and it’s quite frankly disappointing that Sony and the BBC haven’t properly investigated and fixed it)

The above is true for my A84L TV at time of writing (at least as far as I can work out). There are several Sony TV series (including A80J, A80K and A80L) that run the same software, so I imagine the above would extend to those too.

Hopefully, someone at Sony (or the BBC) will pull their finger out and fix this properly. (With any luck, it’ll get fixed when they finally move this set on from Android 10…)