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widescreen weirdness! |
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#1 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Liverpool
Posts: 167
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widescreen weirdness!
Hello guys, been a while since i posted quick question im sure the experts can answer had a look but can find no answer
i have a Widescreen LCD TV and a DVD player which is outputting widescreen via component cables, however some widescreen movies still do not fill the screen, like goblet of fire and Revenge of the sith. however some do! why am i still getting letterbox lines when i have a widescreen tele and dvd player outputting correctly and if i missed something simple i will hang me head in shame
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#2 |
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Join Date: Nov 2006
Posts: 19,046
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Quote:
Hello guys, been a while since i posted quick question im sure the experts can answer had a look but can find no answer
i have a Widescreen LCD TV and a DVD player which is outputting widescreen via component cables, however some widescreen movies still do not fill the screen, like goblet of fire and Revenge of the sith. however some do! why am i still getting letterbox lines when i have a widescreen tele and dvd player outputting correctly and if i missed something simple i will hang me head in shame ![]() |
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#3 |
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Join Date: Mar 2000
Location: Snowdonia
Posts: 2,725
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Some DVDs output in cinema ratio which is not 16:9 but wider still, at 2.35:1 I think (16:9 is 1.78:1). Check your DVD box to see what aspect ratio it says. If this is the case then you will still get black bars top and bottom on a 16:9 TV.
Do the pictures look in proportion, or are they squashed/stretched in some way? If they're in proportion and the pictures fills the width of the screen, and you've got black bars top and bottom, then you're viewing the film in cinemascope ratio. |
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#4 |
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Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Liverpool
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films do appear in proportion and are still watchable, TBH the bars dont bother me too much im just surprised it doesnt fill the screen
im sure that revenge of the sith was an anamorphic, not got the case near me though
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#5 |
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Join Date: Jan 2005
Posts: 197
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An example of this can be viewed here:- http://www.widescreen.org/widescreen_tv_qa.shtml
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#6 |
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Join Date: Mar 2000
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Quote:
films do appear in proportion and are still watchable, TBH the bars dont bother me too much im just surprised it doesnt fill the screen
Quote:
im sure that revenge of the sith was an anamorphic, not got the case near me though It might well be anamorphic as well, I'm not sure how they do the cinemascope DVDs. Anamorphic means that it's actually a wide picture that's been horizontally compressed into a square-ish 4:3 and then the TV uncompresses it on display. For a 16:9 picture, the 4:3 area is going to be completely full, for a 2.35:1 picture even the 4:3 squashed picture is going to have black bars top and bottom although its width is completely filled.
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#7 |
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Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 2,313
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Quote:
films do appear in proportion and are still watchable, TBH the bars dont bother me too much im just surprised it doesnt fill the screen
im sure that revenge of the sith was an anamorphic, not got the case near me though ![]() |
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#8 |
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Join Date: Mar 2000
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Yep indeed - from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamorphic_widescreen
"...This is accomplished by electronically scaling the 16:9 image to the DVD-standard 4:3 ratio (with either NTSC or PAL resolution). This creates a vertical stretching of the image, as the horizontal pixel resolution is always at full-width. Sources that are close to 16:9 can be transferred to DVD taking up the entire 16:9 frame with no wasted space. However, sources that are wider than 16:9, such as 1.85:1 or 2.39:1 video, must still be letterboxed into the 16:9 frame with varying amounts of black bars." This implies that DVDs are always 4:3 and therefore always anamorphic if the picture is wider than that, unless they have pre-letterboxed the picture into 4:3 anyway. |
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#9 |
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Quote:
im sure that revenge of the sith was an anamorphic, not got the case near me though
![]() Format: Widescreen Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1 |
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#10 |
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Hehe, I've just realised something by reading that article that most of us have got anamorphic the wrong way round! We tend to explain it by saying it's a horizontally squashed picture that is unsquashed by the TV. In effect, that would lose horizontal resolution, which I've always thought odd as widescreen pictures would not be as detailed as 4:3 pictures. However, the article says that the horizontal resolution is preserved on the recording but the vertical resolution is *stretched*. The TV then compresses it vertically, so restoring the proper resolution and nothing is lost. That makes more sense!
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#11 |
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Banned User
Join Date: Jan 2007
Posts: 1,104
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All dvd's of Revenge of the Sith are anamorphic.
Any 2.35:1 film will have borders top and bottom to retain entire width of picture. Check out the original Star Wars Trilogy double disc sets to see how anamorphic presentation improves quality. The doctored versions are anamorphic but the original untampered versions are taken from Laserdisc masters so these are simply letterboxed. |
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#12 |
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Join Date: Mar 2003
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anything in letterbox format will still have some degree of black bars top and bottom of the screen.
Things in 16:9 Widescreen will fit the screen. The issue being there are several variations of Widescreen. This turned out to be a bit of a shock for a lot of people when buying their first Widescreen (16:9) tv's - including me, many years ago. Another problem is the format switching. There are 2 methods of format switching, voltage and Line23. With the voltage switching, the signal is sent up one of the internal cores on a scart cord. So without scart, you wont get format switching. I had the same problem several years ago when I hooked up my 1st DVD Player which was a R1/R2 machine - which used RCA phonos (no scarts). The other method is called Line23 switching, and this sends the data signal for switching inside the video image its self - one of the lines out of view - a bit like the old teletext lines being off screen. This works regardless of the type of connection used. I had a few DVD's when I bought that R1/R2 DVD Player that did auto format (up the RCA phono's) and this was due to the disc carrying the Line23 switching system. But these discs were (are?) very rare. Dave |
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#13 |
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Join Date: Feb 2005
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i am living in Hong Kong, and have a widescreen 26" Hitachi LCD. None of the broadcast source material is 16:9 though, and it does really annoying things with 16:9 material that is broadcast with black bars top and bottom.
Instead of getting rid of the black bars, it seems to stretch the whole picture so that you still get black bars top and bottom - and the 16:9 picture is squashed vertically and doesn't fill the 16:9 screen! None of the available formats (4:3; 'panoramic"; "full" or "cinema"), give you the right aspect ratio. I have only known Philips widescreen sets in the UK previously, which seem to figure it out for themselves and get rid of the black bars, allowing a 16:9 picture broadcast non-anamorphically to fill the screen properly. Do other sets work in this weird Hitachi way? Have I been spoiled? |
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#14 |
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Banned User
Join Date: Jan 2007
Posts: 1,104
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Quote:
i am living in Hong Kong, and have a widescreen 26" Hitachi LCD. None of the broadcast source material is 16:9 though, and it does really annoying things with 16:9 material that is broadcast with black bars top and bottom.
Instead of getting rid of the black bars, it seems to stretch the whole picture so that you still get black bars top and bottom - and the 16:9 picture is squashed vertically and doesn't fill the 16:9 screen! None of the available formats (4:3; 'panoramic"; "full" or "cinema"), give you the right aspect ratio. I have only known Philips widescreen sets in the UK previously, which seem to figure it out for themselves and get rid of the black bars, allowing a 16:9 picture broadcast non-anamorphically to fill the screen properly. Do other sets work in this weird Hitachi way? Have I been spoiled? Most tv's have an auto setting that will switch between widescreen with WSS and 4:3. The auto setting will also auto zoom a non anamorphic letterboxed picture although this normally takes a few seconds for the tv to detect the blank area |
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#15 |
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Join Date: Feb 2005
Posts: 2,183
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Quote:
A non anamorphic widescreen picture needs zooming to fill the screen.
Most tv's have an auto setting that will switch between widescreen with WSS and 4:3. The auto setting will also auto zoom a non anamorphic letterboxed picture although this normally takes a few seconds for the tv to detect the blank area |
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#16 |
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Join Date: Sep 2004
Posts: 14,718
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Quote:
my Hitachi doesn't have that....never mind
just to make it clear, I'm talking here about the TV detecting b/w bands at the top/bottom of the picture, not the autozoom that Channel 4 use to zoom a 4:3 letterbox terrestrial picture, they transmit a zooming signal. |
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#17 |
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Banned User
Join Date: Jan 2007
Posts: 1,104
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Quote:
my Hitachi doesn't have that....never mind
My Panasonic AUTO setting will stretch an anamorphic picture to correct proportions providing WSS is present. If its 4:3 it displays in 4:3. With a letterboxed picture it takes a variable amount of time until it realises what is there. However,for a brief time some years back Panasonic marketed sets that refused outright to display anything other than 16:9 from an RGB source. So a 4:3 picture was also stretched. Luckily they did not do it for too long. My friends Philips tv has an AUTO setting but all that does is make sure everything is in 16:9 ,so any 4:3 stuff is stretched and distorted to fill the screen. For WSS to work like it does on my Panny,the stupid Philips has to be set to 4:3. Try various settings. One should work. |
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#18 |
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Forum Member
Join Date: Jan 2007
Location: Liverpool
Posts: 167
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Hi Folks
crikey left this for a while and came back to some fairly comprehensive stuff there, thanks im quite happy now with what i know, i guess some Films that come on DVD just come with different aspect ratios top marks to all for the information
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