GoVegan

I was just at my parent's house for father's day and I was having a DVD problem. I'd purchased A Hard Day's Night for my father, which is a widescreen disc. We popped it in, started playing it and I noticed right away that it wasn't playing in widescreen. (Note: the TV is a 4:3 model)

So, we dug out the manual for the DVD player, I found that it has a "size to screen" mode, which is their option for zooming in to eliminate the dreaded black bars. I pushed the button on the remote and it zoomed in a bit further, so that couldn't have been the culprit. I also tried the DVD player's zoom function, but that also hadn't been enabled.

To confirm my suspicion that the picture was slightly zoomed in, I grabbed another one of their discs, the Sound of Music, which is a 2.35:1 disc. Sure enough, when I put in this disc, there were small black bars, but the bars weren't nearly the size they should have been - it clearly wasn't playing at it's proper aspect ratio.

At this point, I looked at the manual for the TV, thinking that must be the problem, but the TV didn't have any options for zooming in.

I'd really appreciate it if one of you could give me a few troubleshooting pointers. I was pretty sure the problem would either be the DVD player or the TV, but it doesn't seem to be either one.

Relevant info:

Samsung DVD-S221 DVD player
Panasonic CT-36633 TV (4:3)

Mr. Salty

Well, to start with "The Sound of Music" is not 2.35:1, it's 2.2:1. If the TV has a bit of overscan, it can end up looking just a little wider than a 1.85:1 film. This is assuming your parents have the widescreen version of TSOM. It is available in pan-and-scan.

The first thing I would do is make sure the DVD player is set to output 4:3 letterbox. Then make sure any zoom function is turned off completely.

GoVegan

Thanks for the advice. Yeah, you're right about the Sound of Music. I should have remembered that, since when I looked at the box, I thought to myself that I'd never seen that aspect ratio before. I did test another movie that was 2.35:1, though, and it didn't appear correct either.

How do you normally set DVD players to output 4:3 letterbox? I read through the entire manual and the only setting I found for changing the display were the "fit to screen" function, which wasn't enabled and a zoom function, which also wasn't enabled.

Johnny Zhivago

In the main setup menu of the DVD player, there is always an option to set your player to 4X3 letterbox, 4X3 pan & scam or 16X9. Sounds to me like your folks are running a player with the factory default set to 16X9. All of their anamorphic DVDs will be stretched on a 4X3 tele... Ick. You would be surprised (OK, maybe not) at how many people do this and never notice that the picture is completely wacked. < Smiley dammit!

BTW, I'm pretty sure that A Hard Day's Night has an anamorphic 1.66:1 transfer... Assuming your player was set to 4X3 letterbox, the bars might very well be covered by set overscan...

Josh Z

A 1.66:1 anamorphic transfer has to be windowboxed, inset into the same height portion of the frame as a 1.78:1 image. So, the TV would have to have a really severe amount of overscan to not see letterboxing.

GoVegan

Excellent. Thanks a lot everyone. I just reread the manual online and found the section for setup. Somehow I totally missed that when I was reading the manual Saturday at midnight. It looks like it should be a snap to set the player to the correct setting.

I'm glad this came up there, since I finally bought my first non-computer DVD player and I'm basically an A/V tard. I was quite surprised when I went to hook my new DVD player up to my TV and discovered that the TV was so crappy and old it didn't even have any compatible connectors. Neither did my crappy, old VCR. At least that gave me a good excuse to get a better TV. (Not much better, but a little better. I'm very, very slowly working my way up to a 60" widescreen TV.) I would have been very surprised to find out I couldn't even get things to show up in widescreen after getting it all set up.

Anyway, thanks everyone.