We rented DVDs for new DVD Player-They say widescreen on them when we tried to change DVD Player setting to Regular (box 4.3)screen & Pan & Scan Screen and turned off the 16.9 wide screen the DVD still plays on the wide screen mode. If the DVD says wide screen is there anyway to make it play on regular screen without those wide black lines at the top and bottom of the screen? Most of the latest movies at Blockbuster say widescreen on them. We just purchased a 52" RCA Projection TV and Pioneer DVD Player, so this is all new to us.
Thanks,
Suzanne

I set my DVD player to wide screen mode and any movie that I watch that is 16:9 are played full screen. Other movies that are not 16:9 have very small bars at top and bottom. Alot better than the wide bars when set to 4:3 mode. Just know when you do this some of the picture is being chopped.

Suzanne,

I take it your new PTV is 4x3 (not widescreen). You need to set the DVD player to 4x3 or 16x9 depending on the TV you have, not the DVD you're playing. If you have a widescreen TV, or your TV is able to "squeeze" an anamorphic image, select 16x9. Otherwise select 4x3 for regular 4x3 TV. This will only affect DVDs that were prepared for displaying in enhanced 16x9 mode. OK, here's why.

Movies today are shot originally in some widescreen format, anywhere from 1.78 to 2.1 and more. This specifies how much wider the picture is than the height. A regular TV is 1.33 times wider than its height.

If you want to see the whole movie frame they shot, you need to fit the width of the original image inside the width of your TV screen. Because the ratio of width to height of your TV is smaller (the TV has a relatively higher image), when you place the whole width of the movie image in it, the movie image is not as high. Hence the black bars at the top and bottom.

To provide an image that uses the whole TV screen, the DVD producers actually cut out part of the width of the original image so the width to height ratio is now the same as the 4x3 TV. They do so with a technique called Pan & Scan, where they select an almost square section of the original screen by "panning" around the wider original image left and right. So when you see two people talking in Pan & Scan, there may actually have been three people in the original scene.

Not what I want, but if it's more important to get rid of the black bars than to see the original movie as it was shot, so be it :-).

A good similar situation is printing the negatives from a 35mm camera on 8x10 inch paper - they usually chop some of the width off. But on 5x7 inch paper you get most of the negative image. It's all in the ratio of width to height of the original image, vs, the ratio of the display medium.

Check around - I think DigitalBits.com has some real info and much better explanations on how all this works.

Hope this helps,

DJ

Suzanne,

The short answer is "no." DJ gave a great explanation above. The bottom line is that regardless of how you set your TV and DVD player, a widescreen DVD disc is displaying a picture that is wider than your TV screen.

In order to see the entire picture from left to right, the areas with no picture just show black bars at the top and the bottom of the screen (also known as "letterbox")

Depending on your set, you may be able "zoom in" until the screen is filled from top to bottom. However, you will be cutting off the picture to your left and right.

The only way to quote "see the whole picture on the whole screen" on a regular TV is to use a non-widescreen DVD disc. This does NOT mean you are really seeing the whole picture! As DJ explained above, this simply means you have a "pan and scan" disc. In other words, you are allowing the DVD producer to choose what parts of the scene are not visible.

Since you have a nice large screen, my personal recommendation would be to stick with the widescreen and live with the black bars. You might be comfortable sitting a little closer to the screen. You're still going to get a fairly large picture, and you won't miss anything! -Bruce

Zuzanna,

See http://www.widescreen.org/ for a good exmplaintion (with pictures) on this.

Larry, thanks for the link. I've bookmarked it :-).

DJ

For the zillionth time turn off the lights and no black bars, just like the movie theaters do it. Jeesh

Heres my question: My DVD player has 4:3, 4:3 pan and scan and 16:9 mode. I have a regular Sony Wega 4:3 TV and I have my DVD set to 16:9 mode. With this setting I get the picture in full screen or very minimal bars across the top and bottom depending on the DVD aspect ratio. I tested both modes (4:3 & 16:9)to see if some of the picture was being cut off but both modes viewed the same picture. Is this because my TV can "squeeze" an anamorphic image?

This message was edited by JohnY2050 on 07/22/02 18:15.57.

Actually, an anamorphic movie is "pre-squeezed", and is "unsqueezed" upon playback. This originated in film so a wide-screen movie could 'fit' on standard film width.

Un-processed anamorphic looks like tall, skinny figures, squeezed in horizontally.

I personally prefer the bars so I can see the entire horizontal picture, even though the images are smaller.

Larry
www.fineelectricco.com

That's funny - they look perfect on my Sony KW-34HD1 :-). The bottom line is, to see anamorphic rasters properly in a 4:3 the raster has to be squeezed vertically. If your TV has the sqeeze feature, set the DVD player to 16:9. If the TV doesn't squeeze, set the player to 4:3 and it will activate the player's conversion mechanism when it detects an anamorphic image.

Cheers,

DJ

Alright, I'm confused! I have my DVD set to 16:9 mode and the picture is much bigger and most of the time full screen than what the 4:3 setting displays. Furthermore, the image isn't stretched, scrunched, widened or choped. It's the same image as the 4:3 mode but a much bigger picture. I just don't understand when everyone says when you stretch the image you lose some of the picture. I just don't see it happen. I tested both modes and the image is the same and not like these choped ones -> [Link: home1.gte.net] I get the full picture at full screen or close to it.

John,

What you are saying is not physically possible. i.e. you can't fit a rectangular peg into a square hole.

If you are putting the entire widescreen picture into a 4:3 screen then you're either going to have black bars at the top and bottom or your picture is going to be distorted (squished) to fit into the too-narrow screen.

Have you looked at the http://www.widescreen.org/ link I posted earlier?

Like a friend of mine, I'm betting the DJ's TV has a two features:

1: It auto-detects anamorphic images and displays them at higer resolution in typical letterbox format.

2: It has a "persistent" setting that zooms an image to eliminate the black bars, thereby cutting off the sides.

Feature 1 was designed to allow you to get the full horizontal resolution of a DVD inside the letterboxed area. Very sharp picture. Nifty.

Feature 2 was designed to allow you to zoom into a NON-anamorphic letterboxed movie to make it go to full screen.

By combining the two features, you end up with almost exactly the same effect as if you just bought the full-frame DVD, except that all you see is the CENTER of the frame, not a true Pan and Scan.

I suppose, for people who just can't get past those black bars, it makes sense. I remember the first time I saw a letterboxed movie: I had that sensation that the picture was being clipped off.

Then I saw a wonderful demonstration comparing the letterboxed and widescreen versions of two movies: Ghostbusters and The King and I. One scene in Ghostbusters showed a scene involving two people walking down a corridor, reacting strangely as if to nothing. In the letterboxed version, you saw that there were actually TWO other people in that scene, one on each side of the two people you saw in the "full screen" version. In The King and I, I recall a scene where the audience to the king and the king himself could not fit on the "full screen" at the same time. The effect was that the scene didn't make any sense.

When you see a movie on TV and it says "This movie has been edited to fit your screen," there's a REASON for that. The disclaimer should read, "Significant portions of the image of this movie have been taken away from you." It's really a disservice to all filmmakers that "full screen" has come to mean "we cut out half the picture, but boy-o-boy, we filled up your TV tube." The REAL full frame is the frame of film the movie really comes on. And if I have to have black bars to see the REAL movie, I say, "So be it."

Widescreen TV. It's in your future. :)

Dale

If the Wega has the anamorphic squeeze feature, then you'll get a proper looking display from an anamorphic disc in either 16:9 or 4:3 setting. In 16:9 the TV is doing the squeeze, and in 4:3 the DVD player is converting the anamorphic signal to matted letterbox, and the TV doesn't squeeze. However, if you look closely, the image you get with the DVD set to 16:9 should be sharper because it has more vertical linesin the same height than the matted letterbox image.

DJ

Let's not turn this into an argument over OAR.

John,

Your TV may be stretching the pic without you noticing. Some TVs have intelligent stretch modes (although I don't know if any 4:3 TVs do) that stretch the outside edges a bit more and the center of the pic a bit less. This makes it harder to see the stretch, which means it looks better.

This is most common on widescreen TVs, which have various stretch modes for watching standard 4:3 TV without black bars on the sides.

Otherwise, this is very strange that you can't figure out what's different. Like Larry said, SOMETHING must be different. Either chopped, stretched, compressed, something....

Anamorphic squeeze shouldn't change whether there are bars or not. It should only change the number of lines in actual pic other than the bars. When squeezed, the black bars should be lack of signal as if the TV was off. This means ALL the resolution of the TV is used for just the picture itself. When not squeezed, the black bars should be signal showing black, thus using some of the TV's resolution for black bars.