That's fine, but I added more quotes. Regardless, it happened. I would also remind you that an anamorphic transfer can have up to 33% more video information than a 4x3 letterbox transfer of the same film. Removing 1 of 4 lines simply brings the picture down to the resolution of a 4x3 letterbox transfer.
"You've quoted too much! A fact I will now use against you: I simply reject any statement like this written by someone who asserts, "you probably would not be able to tell the difference between anamorphic and non-anamorphic DVDs"."
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. It's very difficult to notice the difference between an anamorphic and non-anamorphic transfer on 4x3 tvs. You are more than welcome to reject whatever you want - it changes nothing.
"If this "toss one of four lines" scenario is true, how come there's never been any explanation of exactly which lines are discarded? Do you start at the top and go, "keep, keep, keep, toss; keep, keep, keep, toss...," or do you try to keep lines with different information than their nearest neighbours (and therefore preserve detail, but introduce local distortion), or do you do something else as yet unexplained?"
So now the entire technical process must be explained in full detail to make you believe it? I'm not sure that such an explanation is worth my time. This aspect is really not that important to me to prove - I'm simply explaining it to the people who are interested. I'll let them make up their own minds.
"I say you can and do, because on playback, the 720 x 480 non-square pixels cover the same area as the "original" 854 x 480 square pixels."
Yet the DVD frame is still 720x480 - it can never be anything but, or else you have an illegal frame size and the DVD player will not recognize it. You are confusing storage of the information with playback of the information. Any other frame size extrapolated from that is creating visual information not specifically found in the original frame. If you resize the 1920x1080 video to 720x480 for the DVD frame, you will never be able to recreate the same 1920x1080 video - it would simply be an extrapolated fascimile. What you are arguing is akin to saying that one can recreate the original AVI from the compressed MPEG, and that simply isn't the case. A lot of video information is lost in the process, never to be regained.
Anamorphic video means recreating the original transfer from the compressed transfer, and DVD simply cannot do this. Otherwise, there'd be no need for scalers.
"Fact is, I could write a widescreen DVD page and say anything I liked, but it wouldn't make it true. A half-truth, oft repeated, is still not fact."
So now, you are stating that all my sources are made up and/or incorrect? That's a rather dubious and self-serving presumption.