“The fact is that your preference is a very unpopular preference, and because of that, there isnt any need to sacrifice bluray compatibility just so that people watching on a HD have the option of cropping the image.”

… that seems to be the problem in a nutshell… I didn’t realize that it MUST be letterboxed in order to get full wide screen for BR. Most torrents are not letterboxed.

“You are literally the first person on this forum asking for something like this.”

…That surprises me. It’s not like TV always shows the wide screen version either, even when one is available.

“Just go into the manual crop in VLC, crop off the letterbox, then crop off the desired amount of side-image, and enjoy your botched version of Star Wars.”

…I closed VLC and tried this again. Now it works with manual cropping, while previously it didn’t. Odd. Problem solved, thank you. Now if I only found my old CRT… ahhhhh.