Originally posted by: yourmother
i have a question about these set of dvds you are working on
first question:
(i am still learning here so bear with me)
with the anamorpic widescreen will the picture look stretched on a normal 4:5 tv
or will it have the black letter box bars?
the reason i ask is because the new trilogy dvds
the official ones
say that they are animorphic widescreen and they have to black bars on a 4:5 tv
but on my widescreen tv the bars are still there
even when i set the tv to 16:9
the only way that i can get the picture filled and not cut off a whole lot of the picture is by setting the tv to 4:5 zoom 1

2.35:1 movies will ALWAYS have black bars no matter what TV you're using, because there is no TV wider than 1.78:1 (16:9). And the picture doesn't look stretched on a 4:3 (1.33:1) TV is because the DVD player is set up correctly...if it isn't, then it will look stretched, which is wrong.

Any 1.85:1 movie still has bars but they are almost unnoticeable. I don't know what the hell they do with 1.66:1 ... maybe they put bars on the sides?

And those black bars on 2.35 movies like Star Wars are encoded in the stream, not player generated. Pop one into the computer and you'll notice, playing it back not at full-screen, that they have black bars. Since no TVs are wider than 16:9, why bother encoding it any wider than 16:9, right? That's why the black bars are there.

For more info, go here.