# Free OTT Test Card: Catch Aspect-Ratio and Crop Bugs (16:9 and 9:16) **Source:** https://vodlix.com/blog/ott-aspect-ratio-test-card **Summary:** Download a free 1920x1080 and 1080x1920 test card that instantly reveals stretched, squashed or cropped images in OTT apps, players and thumbnails. **Published:** 2026-08-18 **Publisher:** Vodlix --- Every OTT platform has the same quiet bug somewhere in it: an image that is almost right. A poster that is a few percent too wide. A hero banner whose edges are shaved off on a TV. A thumbnail that looks fine on a laptop and subtly wrong on a phone. Nobody files a ticket, because nobody can point at what is broken - it just looks a bit off. The fix is not a better eye. It is a test image that cannot lie. ## Why "looks fine" is not a test {#why-looks-fine-is-not-a-test} Aspect-ratio bugs hide because photography hides them. Stretch a landscape by four percent and a viewer cannot tell. Stretch a face, a logo, or a circle by four percent and everyone can. That is the whole idea behind a test card. You put shapes into the frame whose correctness is self-evident, so a wrong render announces itself instead of hiding. ## The Vodlix test card {#the-vodlix-test-card} We built one for our own QA and we are giving it away, because every streaming team needs it and most end up drawing something worse on a Friday afternoon. Everything on it is a deliberate trap for a specific bug: - A circle inscribed in a square, touching at four green dots. A circle is only round at one aspect ratio. Squeeze the frame and it becomes an oval and pulls away from two of the dots. - Diagonals at exactly 45 degrees. Any non-uniform scale changes the angle, and the printed label stops matching the line it points at. - A checkerboard of exact squares. Squares become rectangles the moment the ratio slips. - A hairline along the true edge, corner brackets on the corner pixels, and four EDGE labels. If any of them is missing, the frame is being cut. - A 0 to 100 percent ruler down all four sides. If it starts after 0 or stops before 100, you are looking at a crop or a zoom. No measuring, no overlay, no reference file. If the circle is round and you can read all four edges, the render is correct. ## What a broken render actually looks like {#what-a-broken-render-actually-looks-like} Here is the same image in four states. Only the first is being displayed correctly. The two failures are worth telling apart, because they have different causes and different fixes. **Squashed or stretched** means something forced the image into a slot of the wrong shape - a hard width and height in CSS, or a scale mode that fills rather than fits. The circle turns into an oval. **Cropped or zoomed** means the ratio was preserved but the frame overflowed its container. Notice that the circle stays perfectly round in the cropped example. That is the trap: cropping does not distort anything, it just quietly removes the edges. Without edge markers you would never notice. ## Portrait matters more than landscape {#portrait-matters-more-than-landscape} 16:9 usually survives, because everything is built for it. Vertical is where assets break - Reels, Shorts, mobile hero art, phone lock screens. So the card comes in 9:16 too. A 9:16 asset dropped into a 16:9 slot with a fill scale mode loses roughly a third of its height. The card makes that obvious in a second instead of a debate. ## Download {#download} Free to use, no attribution required. PNG, exact pixel dimensions, light and dark: - 16:9 landscape, 1920 x 1080 - light and dark - 9:16 portrait, 1080 x 1920 - light and dark - Failure-mode reference sheets for both ratios [16:9 light (1920 x 1080)](/assets/testcards/vodlix-testcard-16x9-light.png) · [16:9 dark](/assets/testcards/vodlix-testcard-16x9-dark.png) · [9:16 light (1080 x 1920)](/assets/testcards/vodlix-testcard-9x16-light.png) · [9:16 dark](/assets/testcards/vodlix-testcard-9x16-dark.png) Use PNG rather than JPEG for the test itself. JPEG compression can soften the two-pixel edge hairline enough that it looks absent at small sizes, which would have you chasing a crop bug that is not there. ## How to use it properly {#how-to-use-it-properly} - Put it through the real pipeline, not onto a desktop. Upload it as artwork on a test title so it passes through your resizer, your CDN transforms and your app layout - that is where the bug lives. - Load it on real devices. A TV app, a phone, a tablet and the web player will each fail differently. - Photograph or screenshot the result and compare it against the checklist printed on the card. - Leave the test title in place. It becomes a permanent regression canary - the next time someone changes a scale mode, you will see it immediately. ## Why we care about this {#why-we-care-about-this} Vodlix is a white-label OTT platform, which means every image on it belongs to somebody else - our customers' posters, their branding, their thumbnails. Getting the geometry wrong is not a cosmetic problem, it is us damaging their artwork. So the card is part of our own QA. We are publishing it because the problem is not unique to us.