Originally posted by: ronlaw
Just a small note, because it's kind of ironic and also could cause some confusion in future:
Blu-ray and HD-DVD are always letterboxed!
That is to say: there are no anamorphic formats defined, which means that no movie wider than 16:9 ratio can use the full resolution of 1080. They must always be letterboxed, encoding the black bars as part of the signal (albeit highly compressed).
This is a bit ridiculous, IMO, since this means you will rarely if ever get 1080 lines of actual signal even though it's in "1080p". For the moment it's not a problem as it's still an advance over DVD, but not as much as it should have been.
Just a small note, because it's kind of ironic and also could cause some confusion in future:
Blu-ray and HD-DVD are always letterboxed!
That is to say: there are no anamorphic formats defined, which means that no movie wider than 16:9 ratio can use the full resolution of 1080. They must always be letterboxed, encoding the black bars as part of the signal (albeit highly compressed).
This is a bit ridiculous, IMO, since this means you will rarely if ever get 1080 lines of actual signal even though it's in "1080p". For the moment it's not a problem as it's still an advance over DVD, but not as much as it should have been.
This is not so. Films with an aspect ratio wider than 16x9 obviously have to be since they are wider than "widescreen"/16x9 sets, otherwise you would have to crop it to fill it. So yes, a film that is 2:35 is obviously going to have a slight letterbox since there physically is no way to accomplish it, but the films are still encoded in an anamorphic 16x9 image. The only other option would be to make 2:35 TV sets, but then you would be complaining about the letterboxing on all movies narrower than that aspect ratio, which are far greater in number than the ones in 2:35.