So we all know 144p, 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p, and 1080p. But why is there no setting for something like 550p?
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You will notice that these go up roughly (in most cases exactly) in a 1:1.5 ratio. In other words each jump improves horizontal resolution by 50%
So an extra resolution between 480 and 720 would be an anomaly.
480p exists mainly because that’s standard NTSC horizontal resolution, or thereabouts (which is why 640×480 was a popular “high resolution” for computer displays in the 90s). 720p and 1080p follow the typical resolutions that were brought in for “HD Ready” and “HD” television sets. Since the existence of those resolutions meant a lot of LCD panels were built to that scale, it really made very little sense to introduce an intermediate resolution for video, because it would display like garbage on both a 480p and 720p display.
PAL DVD video is at 576i or 576p and so is PAL digital television that is in SD and not in HD.
Generally the vertical resolution will always be something divisible by 96 for digital TV and media standards.
Computer resolutions are more varied but usually are in some way derived from old time 640 × 480 or 320 × 200 monitor resolutions. If you trace things back far enough you will find that IBM punch cards came with enough room to leave 80 x 12 holes in them, which ended up leading to text-based interfaces having 80 or 40 characters per line and each character being made up out of 8 by 8 pixels. The common shape of TVs made for the 4 by 3 ratio and those constraints let to early display resolutions and newer once are just those multiplied by a certain number in size and adjusted for the 16 to 9 or similar ratio in modern wide screens.
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