Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

I took a look at the *.ifo files on a known botched dvd version of Casino Royale, in order to figure out what might be causing them to be "unplayable".

As far as I could figure out, it was some heavy "extra basketcase drm" (in addition to the generic dvd-video css drm) which attempted to cause then-current ripping programs to fall into an infinite loop and/or outright crash.

The subsequent dvd copies of Casino Royale released by Fox, did not have this "extra basketcase drm". For example, such as the various bluray/dvd/digitalcode combo set versions release by Fox.

Sony was releasing MGM titles during the mid-2000s, until the MGM board of directors change to Fox after 2006.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-...m31-story.html

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

Man, 25 years, I can't believe it. First time I saw DVDs for sale was during a trip to Japan in April 1997 (can't believe that trip was 25 years ago this month!). I was in a Tower Records and they had a stack for sale, mostly Warner titles as I recall, and a Japanese edition of the Hong Kong film Chungking Express, which was playing on various little monitors in the store. I didn't pick up my first player until 2000, and I think the first DVD I bought was the special edition of Boogie Nights.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

I never had my own standalone dvd player until sometime in the late 2000s.

Back in the day, my then-wife was the one who was buying the laserdisc and dvd players for stuff like karaoke. After the divorce, she got all the laserdisc/dvd stuff. Though she left behind several of my dvds which she really hated, such as Cheech and Chong, etc .... ;)

So for several years, the only way I could watch my dvds was on the computer. (I rarely ever watch them anyways).

Eventually sometime in the late 2000s I got an old standalone dvd player from a then-nearby friend, who was clearing out old junk they didn't want anymore.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

This is something I just don't get... *why* are they not required? The FCC 100% requires SDH/CC on *all* broadcasts. Having that on a physical media release seems, to me, to be a given/necessity.

I almost always watch with subs on - for new movies it's because the sound mixes are often horribly done with dialog buried in sfx/music queues, for older ones it's "just because" and I sometimes "get" things I'd never truly heard properly before, and sometimes it's because it's late at night and I can use those while keeping the volume down enough that my wife doesn't complain.

It really hit home a few weeks back when my 18yo grandson came over for a first time viewing of Game of Thrones (yes - and he's managed to remain mostly spoiler free to boot) and *asked* for them to be turned on because "Lots of times you just can't hear or understand what's being said and those fill in the gaps." This from a "kid" with good hearing. That made me feel better and pretty much said my hearing likely isn't as "bad" as I thought it was (and I *do* have issues - some from constant ear infections as a kid, others because I generally listen to music at very loud levels, and some just from age).

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

Yeah, between my hearing going and the terrible sound mixing out there, we have them on for almost everything we watch now. Most streaming services have them nowadays, but stuff we find from alternate sources is hit or miss.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

Here's a good article about the current state of sound and dialogue in the movies. You aren't the only one having trouble hearing dialogue.

https://www.slashfilm.com/673162/her...ays-to-fix-it/

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

I tried it in my PS5 this morning and it worked fine. I just realized I haven't owned a dedicated DVD/Blu-ray player in several years. For so long now we've had either a PlayStation or Xbox of some kind in both our living room and bedroom so we've been using those for a while now.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

At the time circa 2008, Netflix even had an official list of standalone dvd players which would choke and not play these partcular botched Sony dvd discs.

https://static.flickr.com/3035/27416...175f3bc303.jpg

https://zatznotfunny.com/2008-08/net...py-protection/



https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/dvdtalk...e754f4bd10.jpg

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

The botched dvd copy of Casino Royale I came across, was one which came in a larger longbox with a deck of cards included. It was a $2 dump bin find at a dollar/discount store back in 2011 or 2012.

At the time, I also picked up "The Holiday" and "Stranger Than Fiction" found in a local $3 dvd dump bin. From reading the *.ifo files, I saw that they both also had the same extra basketcase drm as the botched Casino Royale dvd version.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

Wow, I guess I had missed that issue back in 2008. I do recall the issue with some CDs having that DRM problem.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

I can't remember the very first DVD I bought back around 1998, but one of the first was a blind buy, a good paranoia drama/thriller called Stuart Bliss.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

You know, I didn't mention my first, and I still have it actually and it's also a James Bond flick since we're talking about them: it was the silver cover special edition of Tomorrow Never Dies. I bought it even before I had my player because I was afraid it would be hard to find if I didn't.

Then I bought the first three single disc editions of the South Park episodes from the first season. We watched the hell out of those four DVDs until the used market came into existence and I could afford more discs.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

Did this version of "Tommorow Never Dies" have the 4:3 fullscreen AND 16:9 widescreen versions BOTH on the same single-sided dvd disc?

(ie. In the first menu screen, there was an option to choose either the widescreen or fullscreen version to watch).

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

The second dvd I purchased was Total Recall, which I purchased at the same time as that first Terminator2 dvd. Though I never actually opened up the Total Recall dvd package.

When I played that defective Terminator2 dvd disc that froze twenty minutes into the movie, subsequently I went back to the retail store and got a refund for both dvd titles.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

It's interesting - I've done sound mixing professionally and what I read was "excuse/excuse/excuse/etc" with no one accepting the blame for creating mixes where the *voices* are at most 25% on a meter with sfx and music pushing 100% (if not close to clipping) on the vast majority of movies. I've yet to purchase a "current" movie (made in the last 20 years) that has a *properly* done stereo only mix in English. You get them for every language *but* English. English mixes are 5.1/7.1 and sound simply horrible on standard consumer equipment. They might sound "OK" if you have a system capable of playing such mixes properly but few people do. The mixes I hear at home sound no different than what I hear in the theater - and they're almost always horribly done. When someone's speaking intelligibly and you *still* can't hear it because the voice is just too low in the mix then someone's not done a good job. I stopped going to the theater as much due to "bad" sound mixes as the "quality" of the patrons. If you have to strain to hear a "whisper" on a movie sound track the person mixing the audio hasn't done their job. Sometimes that means a "whisper" must be turned up on the track and be louder than you'd expect just so it can be heard. In order to *properly* hear dialog you not only need "actors" who can enunciate properly but the voice levels *must* be at least 75% as loud as the loudest thing on an audio track and *that's* just not happening.

One of the audio people commented on directors who overuse music to convey emotion when there's *none* present in the dialog. That's a huge pet peeve of mine. I like to quote Roger Ebert in those cases:
That rarely happens these days. It frequently blows you out of your seat and works hard to be the auditory focus at all times.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

I just checked, it’s widescreen only.

I think the first batch of 007 DVDs were the ones in snapper cases and they were all dual sided. And I think they were a mix of Bond actors. I’ve been thinking it would be neat to have collection of those first few Bond titles but I *never* see those snapper case versions at the used shops. Plenty of all the other releases but not those.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

I'll go you one further: Closed captions for commentary tracks and other supplemental features! I've found a handful of releases with captions for those things, but it's a tiny sliver of discs I've ever watched.

Also: Selling DVD's with Full Screen and Widescreen versions makes sense for that early transitional phase, but they did everyone a disservice by selling separate discs entirely. That only encouraged holding onto pan & scan and the phobia against black bars on a screen.

With TV series that have already concluded, it's woefully misguided to decide whether to release subsequent seasons based on how well the first season sells. If someone is a dedicated enough fan to want to own a TV series on disc in the first place, they almost certainly want a complete series box set and are willing to wait for that.

When my wife left, I was fine with almost everything she took, except Who Framed Roger Rabbit (which I can at least understand taking) and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (which made no sense since she actively disliked it!). I eventually replaced both with Blu-rays, but still...!

That was the Walmart exclusive variant. It should have also included a replica poker chip.

That was its first release, in 1998. I bought it on VHS since I didn't have a DVD player or any expectation of getting one at that time. It was the box set with a copy of the shooting script, some photos, and a second tape with the Secrets of 007 doc that's a special feature on the DVD. in hindsight, that was a prelude to what's come later with Blu-ray releases rarely having any of the fun bells and whistles of DVD's.

Made all the worse by the fact that what passes for movie music today is generally droning audio wallpaper.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

Did this Walmart exclusive exist for a 16:9 widescreen dvd version with the deck of cards (and chip) ?

By the time I found these longbox variants of Casino Royale with the deck of cards, I only ever saw the 4:3 fullscreen versions. I have never seen a widescreen dvd version of this walmart exclusive with a deck of cards.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

There was a now rare dvd version of "The Man With The Golden Gun" from that initial batch in the late 1990s, which was botched.

Apparently when that Man With The Golden Gun dvd disc was first mastered, the encryption title key was abruptly changed at the layer change. Some dvd players didn't know how to handle this abrupt change in encryption keys, where the video was played scrambled for a few seconds or longer at the disc layer change.

I don't know if MGM ever recalled / replaced this defective version at the time.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

Yep! I owned the Widescreen version. Found this one on eBay in case you're curious.

Since we've ended up going down the Bond DVD rabbit hole, I remain fascinated how consistently underwhelming Bond DVD and Blu-ray cover art has been. It's especially baffling given how nifty so much of the poster artwork has been over the years. That said, I have a certain fondness for the Special Edition DVD's from 1999-2000. I bought them a la carte, but later bought empty slipcases for the three box sets on eBay. Awhile after I bought my first DVD player, I splurged on a surround sound system. GoldenEye was the first movie I watched with that. I was giddy. I can't remember if I bought it the same day, or if I already had GoldenEye.

Also, in 2003 when Die Another Day was released, Costco ran a promotion where if you pre-ordered from them for $17.99 (including free shipping!), you got to pick one your choices of either Moonraker or The World Is Not Enough free. It was convenient for me because Moonraker was the last one I hadn't bought and I didn't want to actually pay to buy it. There are things I do like about Die Another Day, plus I was interested in all the bonus features. It always kinda bummed me out that they deviated from the package layout they'd used for all the others, which was somewhat ironic given that it actually included elements from the poster campaign.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

Did your widescreen dvd copy (from that wallymart variant with the deck of cards) have tons of "extra basketcase drm" which caused playback problems on some dvd players? (As mentioned in that Netflix official list of "sick" basketcase Sony dvds circa 2007).

This particular "extra basketcase drm" on some Casino Royale dvd discs, is easy to spot. Place the dvd disc into a computer dvd drive, and see what files are listed in the /VIDEO_TS directory. The "extra basketcase drm" version will have tons of IFO and VOB files labeled from 01 to 99.

In contrast if there is no "extra basketcase drm", the VIDEO_TS directory will only have a small quantity of IFO and VOB files labeled from 01 to around 08 or so.

I eventually found a generic mass market two-disc Sony release of the widescreen dvd of Casino Royale at a goodwill for $1. This particular copy did not have any "extra basketcase drm". It was authored just like any other generic movie dvd disc.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

Oh, hell, I have no idea. I traded in the DVD several years ago during one of my periodic purges. I don't remember having any playback issues. I watched it once when I first got it, including the special features. After that, I can't say with any confidence whether I even watched it a second time. Re-watching it just before Quantum of Solace opened sounds like me, but that was before I tracked at-home viewings so I can't say. By time Quantum came out on disc, we'd bought a Blu-ray player and I upgraded Casino Royale. That's what I've watched since.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

Did you get the Sony or the Fox version of the Casino Royale bluray?

I remember reading some complaints about the Sony bluray version, about the video being cropped slightly wrong in some scenes. Though I haven't been able to figure out which scenes were problematic, compared to the Fox bluray version.


Other than having different corporate logos, the only other big difference I noticed immediatly was that the Sony version used a very early MKB version of the AACS encryption keys. (Every time hackers crack the current bluray AACS encryption keys, the AACS folks revoke the old compromised keys and issue new ones. This is seen in the MKB file being updated on newer released bluray discs).

The Fox bluray had a later MKB version of the encryption keys reflective of the early 2010's time period. (At the current time, the bluray MKB has been revised more than 75 times already since bluray's inception in 2006).

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

I picked up my first DVD player and DVDs in May 2000. I had graduated college, moved to a city, and was living in an extended stay hotel. It had a TV, but no VHS or anything. I worked an evening shift, so there was nothing really to watch when I got home around 1am. I went to either Best Buy or Circuit City to get a VHS player and some tapes, and realized for a reasonable amount more I could get the DVD player. I believe I picked up Three Kings and Next Friday as my first movies. DVD was awesome, even though the special features were in their infancy at the time. I remember seeing a ton of special feature listings that basically included just the trailer and chapter selection. Being able to skip to specific sections of the movie was really nice, especially when I started picking up concert DVDs. Once the special features really kicked into high gear, I learned a ton about movie making. Selecting angles was another really cool thing, although sparingly used, as I only had a few, and they were also concert discs.

Initially, I bought pan and scan discs. It probably wasn't until after I joined here that I got serious about getting the correct aspect ratio, 2004. I didn't have a proper 16x9 tv until somewhere around 2010, but the discs were all set and ready. Boxed sets of franchises were awesome. Small size, special features for days, so cool.

I sort of lament the change to streaming, but it's ultimately better for me these days. I miss the special features, especially the in-depth behind the scenes stuff. I do miss really diving into a movie, watching it repeatedly because my selection wasn't huge. However, I'm exposed to a lot more now, can find things I wouldn't have if I had to rely on buying a disc from somewhere, and it's so much cheaper. Watching movies/tv these days is more of something to pass the time as opposed to something I used to consider more of a hobby. Life is totally different now, though, and I'm not able to expend as much effort into watching things as I could.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

(On a rambling tangent about bond blurays).

This may sound really silly.

If I'm going to buy another 007 complete movies set (up to the current day), I would likely pick up a 25 movie bluray set released by Warner/Universal SDS if I can figure out that all the bluray discs are reauthored without the BD+ extra basketcase drm.

Apparently Fox was notorious for consistently using the extra basketcase drm BD+ on almost ALL of their bluray releases from October 2007 to Oct/Nov 2017.

The last time I saw any older catalog Bond dvds/blurays at the nearby Wallyworld, it appears it was just the old Fox inventory with a newer "Warner" sticker placed by hand over the old Fox information.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

You sure? I'm trying to find some listing for that, but I can't seem to. I have that widescreen set with the cards and chip, and my records say I got it at Best Buy.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

100% sure. Here's an announcement from MI6:
There's also this forum page on abj007.com with a rundown of the U.S. exclusives:

Best Buy - Corgi Aston Martin
Circuit City - Carta Mundi Replica Poker Chip
Target - Bond on Set book
Walmart - Poker Set

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

When dvd players first started appearing at then-nearby circuit city shops, I didn't intend on buying one at the time. (There were no bestbuy nor any independent audio/video equipment retailers nearby where I lived in those days, and I wasn't willing to drive around window shopping).

I was completely confused about the circuit city DIVX players, and the generic dvd players. Other than the DIVX specific discs being less than $10 a pop, while generic dvd movie discs were easily $20 a pop or higher.

Slightly earlier, I ended up buying a used vhs copy of Goldeneye for around $10. It was one of those multiple dozen copies a nearby video rental store had back when the Goldeneye vhs was first released. Usually this nearby video rental store would get several copies of a then-recently released popular VHS movie. After a year or so when the popularity of that particular vhs movie died down, they would dump the extra copies to the bargain bin for sale. (Typically after the vhs version starts showing up at a local retailer, such as wallymart, etc ...).

This was one of the last pre-recorded vhs movies I purchased.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

What might have been.

In hindsight, the dvd working group(s) should have had the foresight to see that 1920 x 1080 high def resolution would have already been available in the early 2000s. Even if it was still using the mpeg2 codec, on a 30 gigabytes sized disc. Basically a primitive version of hd-dvd.

Though unfortunately, the blue colored lasers used in bluray players would have not been easily available at the time circa 1990s. The patents underlying blue colored lasers were in legal disputes, which were not settled until 2004.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

Weird. My records indicate I got my copy from Walmart, and I know I have the cards and poker chip.
Now that I read your post about the other exclusives, I want to say that I have one of those Corgi Aston Martins as well. Maybe I got both exclusives? Maybe I put in the wrong retailer when I entered it so many years ago?

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

Other retailers versions/exclusives have been known to turn up at Walmart.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

It would make sense to have traded/sold/given away the DVD from Best Buy and kept the one in the Walmart box. How long after 2007 did you enter that record?

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

I guess I could have done that. I wouldn't have kept two copies of the same movie, as the shelf with the bond films is quite full. My purchase date that I have recorded is March 19, 2007.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

It seems plausible that you bought both exclusives, kept only the DVD that went in the gift box with the poker set, and simply made an error when cataloging it. Were you using DVD Profiler, by chance? You may have entered the one from Best Buy first and didn't catch that it auto-filled that in the Retailer field.

To bring us back on track, DVD Profiler played a big part in my evolving feelings about my DVD (and Blu-ray) library. I started tracking at-home viewings when I started using Profiler. That gave me an organized look at what I(/we when I was still married) owned and hadn't watched. Also, because Profiler's default is to just organize everything alphabetically instead of by things like director, franchise, or genre, I started organizing my disc library that way. My wife was initially opposed to the idea but she let me try it. It won her over, though we had different ideas about how strict the system should be.For example, The Adventures of Indiana Jones* box set. (Aesthetically, that might be my favorite box set I've ever owned!) She felt it should be in the I's for Indiana Jones. I argued for the A's because the first word in the box set title for alphabetizing is "Adventures". I eventually won that one. For one thing, there were other multi-film collections that were nearly impossible to alphabetize without using the collection's title. An example would be the "Price-Lee Horror Collection", a cheap 2-disc set. One had three Vincent Price movies crammed onto it and the other had three with Christopher Lee. There was no franchise, as with Indy. Would you go by the first movie in the collection? That was House on Haunted Hill. Also, the box spine was so prominent there was no confusion where to find Indy.

*That Indy box set came out right around my birthday that year. My then-girlfriend/current ex-wife was excited to get it for me as a gift, which was exciting to receive... Except she bought the Full Frame version. I asked if it was okay for me to exchange it for the Widescreen version. She said it was, but she sulked about it for months. A few years later, we got our first widescreen TV. We spent a day binging those movies. She begrudgingly agreed I'd made the right choice.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

I loved spending time on DvdAficionado. Checking out all the various releases of titles and seeing who owned what movies. It’s an absolute punch to the gut that the site was allowed to disappear like that. The idea of the digital landscape was supposed to be that we could have records of everything forever.

It still makes me a little sick that all the work we put into that was just flushed away.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

I never used it, though I read about it on this forum. At the time, I didn't think I was such a nerd I'd care about keeping such meticulous records of what I owned. Turns out, I very much am that nerd.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

I've been using the CLZ Movies app the past few years, mainly because I was buying a few used laserdiscs twice not remembering I already had them and passing up some I thought I already had but didn't.

To comment on the past few posts- Tomorrow Never Dies was the second movie ever re-issued on DVD, dropping the included pan and scan version for extras. The first reissue was Animal House, which was originally in a movie-only 4x3 edition and soon reissued as a special edition.

"Special" movies like Jurassic Park would often take a year or so to arrive on home video. They'd play for about a year in theaters, hitting the second-run houses after leaving the main ones. I even remember newspaper ads around fall of that year saying "See Jurassic Park in theaters, because it won't be on videocassette this year." I think Monsters Inc was the last movie to get that sort of treatment, debuting on video almost a year after its theatrical release. After that they seemed to get the DVD out within a few months to encourage buying it right away. Christmas-themed movies were still delayed til the next year's holiday season, but even that has stopped now with them coming out around February and apparently sell decently then.

One of the first hyped features of DVD was that it would be able to show every movie in both widescreen and pan and scan, at least on 4x3 TVs. While players could be set to crop 16x9 pictures for 4x3, very few discs actually allowed for that- ironically one that did was Criterion's Last Temptation of Christ disc which had the flag set for it accidentally. You couldn't automatically crop 2.35 movies though and the consensus was that it was better to just have separate 4x3 transfers. Those got forced off of discs though when room was needed for more extras, and apparently it was hard to make DVD-18 discs which could have solved that problem. Legend has it that Walmart pressured the studios to support pan and scan more when their uneducated customers returned widescreen discs that didn't fill their screens, thus separate releases became commonplace for a while- never mind that nobody who would willingly choose a pan and scan version would care about any of the extras.

Another hyped feature was the ability to hold different cuts of a movie on one disc- that actually seems to be used more recently than back then. Separate "Unrated editions" were certainly annoying, but it seems when those are put out now they also include the theatrical cuts with seamless branching. Star Wars of course was a HUGE missed opportunity to have different versions included, instead forcing only the version that George Lucas felt was "complete" at that time (which has since been further tweaked in later releases.)

Admittedly I didn't understand 16x9 completely at first and the down-rezzing that occurs on 4x3 TVs, but being a sound nut I refused to listen to a 5.1 track downmixed to 2-channel so I only bought into the format when I could also afford a 5.1 sound system to go along with it.

The ability to copy discs with no loss in quality was certainly a big middle finger to the studios. The first blank DVDs cost around $30 each, but now only cost a few pennies when bought in bulk. The protection schemes involve putting in deliberately bad sectors right before the movie starts, and telling players to just skip over them. Since computers have to read literally the entire disc to make a copy, they get tripped up on those bad sectors. My old Pioneer LD/DVD combo would display "SEARCH" several times when starting movies that used that. I'm a bit surprised that the industry hasn't used copyability as an excuse to kill off the DVD format, Blu-Rays at least require a bit more effort and equipment that's harder to find.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

"Milestones" that I'm not sure of- does anyone know what the very first DVDs to have previews play before the main menu, and the first one that did that one better by making them unskippable? Being a non-linear format, I always thought it was stupid to do that. Universal for a while was putting trailers for recent and/or related titles in the Extras menus, but someone got the bright idea of having them be the first thing that plays and that seems to have continued to today. I remember lots of complaints about "The Sixth Sense" having previews that had to be chapter-skipped through; I never bought that title but got another Disney title (The Aristocats) that was set up similarly.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

I was in High School in Fall of 99 when we got a new family computer with a DVD Rom drive. I was working at Wal Mart at the time, so I would see the DVDs come in each week and had wanted a player for awhile. It was a build to order computer, and before it even got delivered I had already purchased American History X and The Matrix. I'd come home from school each day so I could lay on the floor in the office and watch a movie on the 19" CRT screen. That got old pretty quick, so for Christmas that year I got my own DVD player and a 5.1 shitty surround sound system (that I didn't even have hooked up correctly to get discrete channels) which went with a 27" CRT TV I already had. I also asked for a bunch of DVDs as well, which began my history of shopping at Amazon. I don't remember a lot of what I owned back then, although I remember being able to name every single one of the 20-25 DVDs I owned at the time. Shawshank was the big one though, and I probably watched that a couple dozen times over the next few months. There was also American Pie and the five freebies that came with the player. Probably Austin Powers as well. Like others, I looked forward to the Sunday ads to see what would be coming out that week and who would have the best price as well as just browsing Circuit City and Best Buy. It really opened my eyes to the world of film, as my exposure growing up was really just action blockbusters and some comedies. My spending was initially pretty tapered as I didn't have a ton of discretionary income. That changed when I found this forum and learned about Columbia House. Being able to get DVDs for $7.26 each delivered compared to the $20 it would cost to buy them in store seemed like such a bargain. Pretty soon I was that college kid that had shelves and shelves of DVDs.

And here I am almost 25 years later with a 4K projector on a 110" screen with 9.2.4 surround. My collection consists of almost 2500 Blu Rays and 130 TV Shows stored on a 128TB Plex server that I can watch from almost anywhere in the world and about 500-600 UHDs.

Re: 25 Years of DVD!
 

I worked in the video duplication industry in the late 1990s/early 2000s and it was really difficult to explain 16:9 anamorphic in a world where just about every consumer TV was still 4:3.
Trying to explain widescreen versions that were formatted in 4:3 compared to proper anamorphic 16:9 or 16:9 "Enhanced" 4:3 TVs which could squeeze the pixels into the 16:9 area of the screen.

Don't get me started explaining 2.35:1 scope films letterboxed but still being 16:9 anamorphic; "I still get the black bars on my widescreen 16:9 TV??!!"