“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.
So after all this I think the issue (aside from attitude) may still be that you don’t understand aspect ratios.
If it happened to be filmed in exactly 16:9 it will have zero black bars on your 16:9 TV.
If it is 4:3, it will have black bars on the sides.
If it’s 1.40:1 or 1.35:1 it will have bars on the tops and bottoms.
The issue really isn’t whether or not the file was made for BD compatibility or not. Even if we didn’t care about that, it would still be rendered with the same aspect ratio (vlc would just add it like it does for 4:3 video). Even if there was more than just you requesting this, the logical thing to do is release the intact film. You can come along and do whatever you want to it. But if it was released the way you want, there would be no way for the thousands if people who want it intact to uncrop it. Does that make sense?