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

The experts will surely give the correct term for this but it's normal and has something to do with the aspect ratio of films.....to get the whole picture, a 21:9 cinema film needs to be scaled down to 16:9 to fit onto a widescreen TV....it may also have something to do with anamorphic.......again the experts will no doubt correct me on this as I'm sure I've got some of this wrong....

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.

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

An example of this can be viewed here:- http://www.widescreen.org/widescreen_tv_qa.shtml

Well, you can have a full screen but you'll lose a bit of the picture! The black bars top and bottom allow you to see the whole picture. It's exactly the same problem as a widescreen picture on a 4:3 TV. I think you probably didn't realise that there were formats wider than 16:9.

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.

If it filled the screen (as in no black bars) you would lose action from either side of the screen. You are watching the DVD in cinema ratio, which is far wider than a widescreen TV.

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.

If it's this edition http://www.amazon.co.uk/Star-Wars-Ep...500690-7004730 then...

Format: Widescreen
Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1

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!

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.

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

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?

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

my Hitachi doesn't have that....never mind

Auto zooming (as opposed to auto widescreen switching) is a real pain because of erroneous detection. You're better off without it as long as you can still zoom manually.

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.

Most tv's have this setting but sometimes not under a sensible name.

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.

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