Posted by Joshua Zyber on 10/05/06 23:48

"Luke Hooft" <noone@nowhere.com.au> wrote in message
news:45255deb$0$8413$5a62ac22@per-qv1-newsreader-01.iinet.net.au...
>> Why would you want this?
>
> It would allow me to watch such non-anamorphic widescreen DVDs in the
> correct aspect ratio, filling up the whole screen AND in progressive
> mode, which would make the lower resolution of a non-anamorphic DVD
> slightly more palatable than interlaced.
>
> This is because when displaying something in progressive mode, my 16:9
> TV can only display the image so that it fills the entire screen - the
> zoom and aspect ratio settings are disapbled) This is fine for
> anamorphic DVDs, but 4:3 and letterboxed DVDs will be stretched out
> horizontally.

Ah, I see. That's an annoying (but not uncommon) design flaw in many
TVs.

For what it's worth, the Oppo's "Wide/Sqz" setting will automatically
pillarbox any 4:3 or non-anamorphic letterbox material into the center
of the 16:9 frame. This will restore your proper picture geometry. The
player also has a zoom function you can enable on the letterbox material
to fill the screen, but unfortunately it has some quality tradeoffs.

I have an old Malata player that will automatically read the aspect
ratio flag on any disc and knows when to pillarbox/zoom letterbox
content. Sadly, the Malata's picture quality otherwise was nothing
special. I'm sure there are other players out there that can still do
this, but I haven't been keeping up (I use a video processor to handle
all aspect ratio conversion).

[Back to original message]