Gogogadget said:
Gogogadget said:
Really don't see how anyone can defend the GOUT.
It's the best officially released source we have yes, but it's still unwatchable."Unwatchable"? More hyperbole. "Unwatchable" is a good word for those VCD encodes of theater bootlegs shot with a low-end camcorder that were circulating on the internet in the late '90s and early '00s. It is funny that this site thrived for years on copies of the OUT that were inferior to the "unwatchable" GOUT. I guess no one was actually watching their LDs or LD-to-DVD transfers back then, you know, because if the GOUT is "unwatchable", the LDs were "extra unwatchable" and the LD-to-DVD transfers were "extra, extra unwatchable".
Maybe you should try a TV for which 4:3 DVDs were intended.
I had the original Star Wars on VHS in the 90s as a young kid, I had a small portable TV in my bedroom and it was perfect, at least so I really thought.
The GOUT was released well after everyone already adopted 16:9 TVs, hell, the other disc in the set was Anamorphic 16:9 and this was at a time when HDTVs were becoming more of a household item and less home-theatre enthusiast too.
If you seriously think the GOUT was acceptable in the mid 00s, then I don't really know what to tell you, because it was shit then and it's worse now.
No, not everyone had adopted 16:9 TVs in 2006 (much less well before 2006), nor even most people. You could even still buy brand new 4:3 standard definition CRT TVs in mainstream stores at the time (e.g. Wal-Mart). 16:9 DVD releases were pretty standard in 2006 because they benefited the ever-increasing number of people who had widescreen TVs, and they were 100% backward compatible with 4:3 TVs, so there was no downside to them.
23.5 million HDTVs shipped in the U.S. in 2006, with a 1998-2006 cumulative total of 54.7 million. There were about 119 million U.S. households in the mid '00s, averaging 3 TVs per household. That's about 357 million TVs, and even if every single one of those 54.7 million HDTVs that shipped from 1998-2006 were sold to consumers and were all still in service in 2006, that only accounts for ~15% of the TVs in U.S. households in '06. Or, if every single one of those 54.7 million HDTVs that shipped from 1998-2006 were each sold to a member of a different household (highly unlikely) and were all still in service in 2006 (also highly unlikely), that still doesn't get you to even half the households.
But this is beside the point, because "disappointment" (which is what your entire post is about) has nothing to do with the question of objective video quality (which is what my posts have been about, including the post that you replied to). You being disappointed with the GOUT's pixel aspect ratio doesn't make it "unwatchable", or "horrendous", or "terrible" by any logical standard.