I have a dish hopper 3 system in my own house. Can anyone tell me why some channels or shows have masking on all 4 sides of the screen? The best description is it looks like watching a wide screen movie that’s been formatted for a 4:3 screen (masking top and bottom) but played on a 16:9 tv causing masking to be placed on the left and right. I never noticed this on DTV or Charter.

And is there a way to fix this?

Settings—> TV—> Adjust Screen

In that area you can adjust the screen up, down, left, right, in and out.

Does it happen on all, or most, shows on a particular channel? Can you switch that channel to non-hd to see if the issue is there or gotten worse? It’s been a while since I’ve done this, so idk how it’s done now.

KOT

It is called picture boxing. It should only be happening on SD channels. If you think (or know) you are on an HD channel and this is happening, something is screwy. Need to look thru your setting and make sure you have the output set correctly.

On an SD channel, you simply use the 'zoom' feature from the format selection and it will fill the screen properly.
On the Hopper, it is a multi button press task = Press 'Options' on the remote, then select 'Display Format'.


Side note:
Everyone has been saying how great the Hopper3 is. And it is a nice receiver with good performance and features.
But the user interface and functionality has GOT to be the biggest POS every made. I have installed a few now and it is very confusing to use.
One customer gave up trying to figure out how to delete a season pass they setup to record. I looked at it and even took me like 10 minutes to figure the crap out. No excuse for that horrible of interaction. Many things you want to do (which are easy to figure out on other platforms) are a nightmare to work on the Hopper3. The interface designer just needs to be shot dead, plain & simple.

Isn’t the screen adjust option for all video? As for your question, I’m not sure. I’ve never kept up enough on when it happens. But based on what I’ve caught today, I think it may be all shows on certain channels. DisneyXD being one of them. I just saw a commercial go to full 4:3 size with masking only on the left and right. Then when it went back to the show my kid was watching, it’s back to masking on all sides.

OK, I decided to try the same show on my iPad with the dish anywhere app. It fills the screen left and right, but still has masking top and bottom, like a 2:35:1 movie played on a 16:9 screen.

I’ve figured out what it is. On DTV and Charter I can set the receivers to stretch 4:3 channels to fill the screen. I can’t find that same option in dish.

Have you tried going to Options -> Display Format -> Stretch ?

And it’s 2017, why is Dish the only major company that does not have some sort of screen saver?

I pause a video, particularly a DVR recoding, and it stays there for hours on end with no screen saver.

And what happened to setting the “update” time to when you want to? My parents are night owls and they get annoyed when their H3 prepares to shut down to do the update. I know they can tell it to not to do the update. But that’s a button that they have to press. And since they denied the update, it won’t do an update not even at a later time.

KOT

There are three different settings that come in to play it seems. I’d check those:

[Link: mydish.com]

I finally did. I thought that would be like changing the format on early PDP’s where it affected everything. But it seems that if I change format on an SD channel, it only affects SD channels. HD channels stays in normal mode.

I agree with Brad, the menus on Dish is anything but user friendly.

Charter also doesn’t have a screen saver when you pause.

I don't like the screen saver.
It's not needed unless you're going to leave for 3+ month vacation and leave paused image on.