Need some help with something weird
 

Tonight my gf brought over the DVD of "Love & Sex."

Two strange things happened. My player is a Panasonic S35.

1. The package says this is anamorphic widescreen. But it played full screen on my TV. It didn't look formatted for full frame, because during the opening credits, letters were chopped off on both sides of the frame. I checked my settings, and my zoom, and I couldn't get it to appear in the widescreen it was supposed to be in.

2. The movie started with the Spanish subtitles turned on. I had to go and turn the subtitles off.

After the movie, I put another in - Superman - and it played correctly, widescreen with no subtitles.

So what's going on here? Is it a bad disc, or an issue with playing on my DVD player? I asked her to check it out on her player, a Toshiba, and expect to hear what she sees there Monday.

Do you have your DVD player setup to output to a 16x9 TV?

My first guess is that it could be a bootleg.

My DVD player is hooked up to a standard screen 32 inch Toshiba. All of my DVDs have appeared properly - widescreens have the "bars," while shows originally shot in full frame appear in full frame.

I've never seen a disc that is supposed to appear widescreen appear fullframe. I thought it might have somehow been zoomed, but when I went through my zoom settings, it only got bigger.

But then I don't understand why it would play automatically with the subtitles turned on. So maybe there is a screen setting that also got switched?

As for being a bootleg - I wouldn't rule that out. She did buy it on Amazon.

You know I have seen that problem too although it happen on my R2 dvd 'Phenomena".The movie is widescreen on a widescreen tv but when I play it on a standard 4X3 tv suddenly it's pan & scan.It's as if it pan & scanned all by itself to fit the standard size tv.The only way I could get a full image on a standard tv without being cropped is to set my player to 16X9 but then again the image will obviously appear tall as it tried to fill the wide image into a 4X3 display.It's strange but that only appear on that one disc.The disc is legit by the way.

Sounds like a disc problem, possibly some snafu at the factory. I've seen a few discs over the years that have needed to be 'coaxed' into playing properly.

My copy of Minority Report does the same thing with the subtitles, and I also have a Panasonic player. It doesn't do that on my XBox or PC though. I would just turn them off with the remote when the movie starts to play. Invader Zim Vol. 1 also starts up with subtitles on my Panasonic.

As for the not showing up as widescreen. My copy of Ginger Snaps Collectors Edition did the exact same thing. My DVD player settings were set to 4:3 (the default). Supposedly some DVD's have a automatic pan and scan feature on them. I changed my DVD settings to letterbox and the film showed up in Widescreen. Try that.

Yeah, that definitely sounds like it might be the problem.

take all the disc out and go to the dvd player menu. select the widescreen for 4:3 tv screen option. If you have never done this, then that is the problem.

Got the report from the gf. She put it in her player and the movie played in widescreen with no subtitles.

Best I can figure is there's something about that DVD on my player that changed those settings. I was able to turn the subtitles off, but I didn't know what to look for to fix the screen appearance. What setting would that be to look for?

I think I have at least one other DVD that starts with subtitles turned on, but this is the first time I've seen the issue with the screen size.

There should be a "Setup" button on your remote control. Turn on the player with no DVD in it and press the setup button. A menu should appear. One of the options should be something like "Display". Select it and that should open up the display menu. There should be an option there for "4:3 (P&S)", "4.3 (Letterbox)" and "16:9". If you're using a 4:3 TV then you want "4:3 (Letterbox).

For the subtitles, you want to do the same thing again but instead of going to the "Display" menu, you want "Languages". There should be an option in there to either turn off the subtitles or select "English".

I haven't used the same model player as you but they all seem to follow the same sort of pattern.