I don't know abny technical definitions for any of this but I will ask anyway; you can then lauff and flame me all you like...

The interactive 'feeds' on Sky Digital...
Are the 'feeds' carried within one frequency ie do the four feeds all bandwith share on one frequency or do they broadcast individually?

The reason I ask is to try to get round the full screen thing; if they are on an individual frequency for each feed then you could probably do an 'add channels' and program the frequencies for each broadcast...even if they weren't full screen my TV would stretch the image.

Is this possible, or is it even possible to 'tune in' the feeds without the 'interactive' part to a separate channel or is that part of the bandwith share as well?

If any of this is even possible how would I go about finding the frequencies?

Again, please laff all you like at this ridicuolous suggestion!

Damn good question. Any techsperts out there?

I don't understand the technical details but I have it on good authority that the feeds come through in the size they are on the screen (quarter size), no larger. There is no point trying to tune to them.

- Beth.

You are probably making perfect sense with the 1/4 screen issue however I did incorproate that point myslef and the idea is to allow the TV to stretch the image ( I have tried this with other images on the screen not specifically encoded with any 'black space' and it works)

So, any further ideas?

E4 is broadcast on 12.168ghz FEC 2/3 SR 27500 and the Interactive data is also carried within the same frequency along with 6 regional Channel4 TV channels.
you can only watch the main E4 Broadcast channel in full screen, but you can do this by pressing 0 (zero) when using the interative mode (Grid Display).
If the program was in Free to Air then the possibility of viewing the interative streams would have been possible, but due to the subscription/encryption system in use the streams have to be tied directly to the broadcast channel.
Otherwise this would leave the skydigital service open to pirate usage, which BSkyB will not permit, understandably.
So in short you cannot seperate the individual streams to allow you to view them in full screen mode on your auto stretch image TV System.

It looks to me as though the interactive video is actually a full-res quad split of the feeds - i.e. each of the four feeds is in one corner of a full screen video signal.

When you view the grid the box is compressing this to fit within the window, and the picture looks pretty poor. When you select one feed, the box crops and moves your chosen feed to fill the window. When it does this the feed is being shown at its normal resolution, so the picture looks OK. As I suspect this is being transmitted by adding a second video feed and four more audio feeds to the standard E4 channel, there is no extra channel that can be tuned into.

Others have managed to confuse the digibox into showing the grid feed full screen, but there is no reliable way to do this, and if you can do it, it is unlikely you could select between the audios.

Hope this makes sense.

thanks to mfirth and roebuck for proper explanations