Wrestlemania 24 DVD aspect ratio weirdness
Here's a strange one:
I bought the Wrestlemania 24 DVD. It's in 16x9 widescreen. When I play it on my 17-inch widescreen computer monitor, it plays in 16x9 widescreen. When I play it on my portable widescreen DVD player, it plays in 16x9 widescreen.
But when I put it in either one of the DVD players I have hooked up to our 4x3 resolution televisions, it does NOT play in 16x9 widescreen. Instead, it plays in perfectly cropped 4x3 standard TV aspect ratio.
Now, I have a lot of widescreen movies in my DVD collection. All of them play in 16x9 widescreen format with the black bars on my regular 4x3 TVs.
But not Wrestlemania 24. And I've fiddled with the TV/DVD settings on the DVD players to get it to play in 16x9, and it won't.
It's almost like the DVD auto-senses what the aspect ratio of the screen is and adjusts the DVD accordingly.
Is anyone else having this problem?
I bought the Wrestlemania 24 DVD. It's in 16x9 widescreen. When I play it on my 17-inch widescreen computer monitor, it plays in 16x9 widescreen. When I play it on my portable widescreen DVD player, it plays in 16x9 widescreen.
But when I put it in either one of the DVD players I have hooked up to our 4x3 resolution televisions, it does NOT play in 16x9 widescreen. Instead, it plays in perfectly cropped 4x3 standard TV aspect ratio.
Now, I have a lot of widescreen movies in my DVD collection. All of them play in 16x9 widescreen format with the black bars on my regular 4x3 TVs.
But not Wrestlemania 24. And I've fiddled with the TV/DVD settings on the DVD players to get it to play in 16x9, and it won't.
It's almost like the DVD auto-senses what the aspect ratio of the screen is and adjusts the DVD accordingly.
Is anyone else having this problem?
Labels: DVD, Wrestlemania, WWE
posted by Mike Jenkinson at
11:18 PM
2 Comments:
The IFOs are set to pan and scan on 4:3 TVs. You might have some sort of success if you rip the DVD, tweak the IFOs w/ IFO edit to be straight widescreen, and burn.
By
Bix, At
June 17, 2008 11:51 AM
Like the guy above said, the way that a widescreen (true 16:9) video source is displayed on a 4:3 screen is set by the DVD authoring itself. Most Hollywood DVD's are set to display as letterbox on 4:3 TV's (the player resizes the anamorphic source, then renders black bars on the top and bottom of the video), but every now and then, you'll come across a widescreen DVD where the 4:3 mode for the main movie is set as "pan&scan." I believe About Schmidt is setup like this.
BUT, you probably actually own plenty of DVD's which use this style of presenting widescreen on 4:3 TV's. Check out the menu of most any widescreen DVD on a true 16:9 TV -- you'll notice that the entire width of the screen is filled with the image without distortion. Now take that same DVD, and play it on a 4:3 TV -- the 4:3 screen is completely filled (no black bars on the top and bottom), but they've also cropped off some of the left and right to fill the screen. Switch back to the 16:9 TV, and notice that there are no navigation buttons on the far left and right of the screen, and the images there aren't crucial to the visual composition. Those menus (whether still menus or full motion video menus) are set by the disc authorer as using the "pan&scan" mode for displaying on 4:3 TVs.
**for accuracy reasons, let me say that it's not actually the TV that dictates the type of display that is connected to the DVD player. In the DVD player's setup menus, you'll find the options where you choose whether a 16:9 or 4:3 screen is connected. There's nothing stopping someone from setting a DVD player hooked up to a 4:3 as being connected to a widescreen TV and leaving the people on the screen extra skinny.(this was a pretty frequent issue before 16:9 TV's were as common as they are today.) If the display mode is set to 4:3, you choose the available resizing modes -- either letterbox (black bars added by the player after the anamorphic video is stretched out) or pan&scan -- the middle 540 pixels or so of the anamorphic image are stretched to fill the screen, losing the far left and far right of the image. Usually you can enable either one or both together.
Depending on your player, you may be able to override the disc's instruction to the player to display the particular video as "pan&scan" by simply enabling the 4:3 letterbox mode (and disabling the 4:3 pan&scan), but that depends on your player. If you can't override it with your player, you're stuck ripping the DVD and editing the IFO's (yuck) which is both simpler and more complicated than you'd expect.
If you have a 16:9 TV, mess around with the 4:3 settings, and you can get a feel for how the resizing works, but if your 16:9 TV automatically resizes the incoming image, it won't show you anything useful, except maybe how the image is cropped in 4:3 pan&scan mode.
By
Dan, At
June 17, 2008 10:31 PM
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home