Aspect Ratio
Aspect Ratio
[A gray car is crushed in a large black clamp.] Whenever someone uploads a letterboxed 16:9 video rescaled to 4:3, I do this to their car.

Aspect ratio is the relationship between the width and height of an image (and in this case, a video) and is denoted in a ratio of <width>:<height> - usually either in lowest common denominator, or with a decimal width to a height of "1". Up until the 1990s, all televisions and most computer monitors (CRT tube and LCD) were in the standard 4:3 aspect ratio, called "fullscreen" (meaning the width is 4/3 or 1.33... times the height). When HDTV was developed, the standard for television screens changed to 16:9 (width being 16/9 or 1.77... times the height), called "widescreen" (although widescreen can also refer to a number of even wider ratios used in feature films). Computer monitors are now available in widescreen ratios, though fullscreen remains common as well.
Letterboxing is a process whereby an image which does not fully fill a screen is expanded to fill the screen by the addition of further material (mattes). Usually this is done with the addition of black bars in the empty space. One example of why this was necessary was widescreen films on VHS cassette. VHS could only record and play back 4:3 images. Thus, in order to display a widescreen film, the rest of the VHS's 4:3 image had to be filled with horizontal black bars at the top and bottom of the image. Those bars were part of the video information recorded on the cassette.
When DVDs were introduced, many DVDs also had letterbox bars on the DVD's full screen image. With the increased popularity of widescreen televisions, DVD players were improved to offer anamorphic widescreen , in which the full widescreen image is horizontally rescaled (shrunk) into a 4:3 size, which the player then was able to display stretched horizontally back to the proper widescreen aspect.
With the advent of Blu-ray, video is generally encoded in whatever its proper aspect ratio is intended to be, and the player itself is left to appropriately matte the image.
The problem with letterboxed video (such as a 16:9 video letterboxed for 4:3) is that if one tries to watch the video on a 16:9 widescreen, where the image should fill the whole screen, instead the 4:3 letterboxed image fills part of the screen with further vertical mattes on the left and right of the image, thus producing an image much smaller than it needs to be, with mattes on all four sides. Some TVs or media players can zoom to help resolve the issue, although the video resolution usually suffers. By encoding only the video itself and allowing the player to do the matting, the video can be seen as large as possible on any given screen.
Animorphs is a late-90's to early-00's young adult book series about shape-shifting teens who turn into animals to fight body-snatching aliens. Sony held the rights to create a film, but never made use of them, beyond creating URLs for a proposed movie on December 11, 2012. Animorphs has since been mentioned in the title text of 1360: Old Files as well as being the main joke in 1380: Manual for Civilization and 1817: Incognito Mode .
In this comic, Randall appears to be complaining about the issue of widescreen videos which have been rescaled to 4:3 by "squashing" the video horizontally to make it narrower, and in the process causing everything to appear thinner/taller than it really is, causing an unpleasant experience. This is akin to crushing a car to the 3:4 ratio while putting black bars on both sides, which Randall uses as disproportionate retribution .
A note is that, if someone managed to "expand" the car, the car would not be "un-crushed" and probably even destroyed even more, referencing the bigger damage done when "squashed" video is attempted to be "expanded" to its original ratio, distorting the video quality. When an image is converted to 3:4, the pixels are resized to squares. When resized to 16:9, the pixels therefore have a longer side and a shorter side.
[A gray car is crushed in a large black clamp.] Whenever someone uploads a letterboxed 16:9 video rescaled to 4:3, I do this to their car.
