I was just watching The Pursuit of Happyness and noticed that the letterboxing was uneven. When I measured it (out of curiosity) it was 9cm of black on the top compared to 8cm on the bottom. So I threw in a different DVD with the same AR and it was even on top and bottom, which I assume is the case with pretty much all my other DVDs since I hadn't noticed it before. Just wondered if this is some problem with my hardware or if it's meaningless. It's not a big deal as far as viewing goes - just curious as to how it would happen. Anyone else ever notice this?

Edit: By the way, I have an Oppo 970 with a Sony 50" widescreen, if that makes a difference.

I too get those uneven bars on my standard TV with Saving Private Ryan and couple of other DVDs. So maybe it isn't the fault of the DVD.

My copy of Michael Mann's The Insider has drastically uneven widescreen bars. The lower bar is at least 3 times as big as the top bar. I'm not sure if this has been corrected in future pressings.

I knew there was another title I got from Netflix that had an uneven bars problem, but I couldn't remember the movie. The Insider was it. I sent it back after watching it for about 10 minutes; it was really distracting on that title.

I have an non-anamorphic letterboxed HK DVD of the movie Avalon (2001) in which the image isn't centered but rather higher on the screen, causing the lower black bar to be slightly larger.

With 2.35:1 movies like Pursuit of Happyness and The Insider, the image is letterboxed inside the 16:9 enhanced frame. So if the image isn't centered exactly in the middle by the producers of the DVD, one of the set of bars is going to be larger, depending on how large the offset it.

With 1.85:1 movies that are anamorphically enhanced, it's much less likely any noticeable offset would occur, since the 1.85:1 image would either be inside the 1.78:1 frame, leaving little room for shifting, or the image would be opened up to 1.78:1, filling the 16:9 frame. In the latter case, the only black bars that would appear would be generated by the DVD player downconverting the image to display on a 4:3 TV.

For Saving Private Ryan, Widescreen Review lists all the DVD releases as having an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 and being anamorphically enhanced, so if the letterboxing is off on that, it would have to be the result of the DVD player.

Thanks Jay G.!

Yeah, I notice this all the time.

When I was watching Crash the other day I noticed that the bottom bar was a lot larger than the top

Thanks for the explanation. It's always a relief to know that I don't have a hardware issue to deal with.

Coincidentally, the only time I've seen different black bars is on my laserdisc of Mann's Heat, which had the 2.35:1 picture noticeably skewed toward the top.