Why would my HD-DVD player do this?
 

Went to watch Mission Impossible (from the standard DVD set with 1 & 2) and when I select widescreen, the movie shows up in a TINY box in the center of the screen. There's more black than there is picture...no exaggeration. What am I doing wrong?

It's because the original MI disc is non-anamorphic widescreen. Basiclly old school letterboxing. There is no problem with your tv or player. Your only option to "Fill the screen" is to zoom in. But it won't look that great.

In other words, I need a newer edition of the MI DVD. :)

I don't mind if the screen isn't filled and all that, but this is on the absurd level.

All MI are available on HD DVD.

It's not absurd at all. The player doesn't know the difference between non-anamorphic letterbox and 4:3, because non-anamorphic actually is 4:3 with bars as part of the picture. If the player was set to zoom such content, it would also zoom 4:3 material. I will gladly accept the occasional need to zoom non-anamorphic material over having 4:3 material chopped up.

I popped 'The Rock' into my PS3 the other day and it looked like that- blah!

Are you sitting really really really far away??

I kid.

I got nothin'.

I was wondering why my A3 did this to one of my older DVDs. Makes sense. I hate using that Zoom feature...ugh.

You know, if discs are tagged properly, and your player is “smart” enough, you wouldn’t need to manually zoom non-anamorphic widescreen DVDs. I have a Malata DVP-520 that does this.

Depending on if the authoring manufacturer did their job correctly, there is a difference between a non-anamorphic widescreen DVD tagged as containing a widescreen film, and a non-anamorphic widescreen DVD improperly tagged as containing 4X3 material. My Malata automatically frames most of my non-anamorphic widescreen DVDs correctly (such as The Abyss). It also automatically pillar-boxes 4X3 material.

But, if the DVD was improperly tagged as containing 4X3 material, when the picture actually contains a widescreen image (such as the Star Wars Original Trilogy “Bonus” discs), then the Malata pillar-boxes the image, and I am then forced to manually zoom-in to frame the picture properly.

It’s a shame that more DVD players aren’t pre-programmed to do this, especially more advanced players such as the Toshiba HD-DVD players. As I understand it, it’s simply a matter of recognizing the tagged information on the DVD, and then displaying the picture accordingly.

I didn't mean it's absurd that the player was doing that...I meant that it was absurd that it was that small. Zooming didn't even help...it made the picture a bit larger, but there was still mostly black on all four sides.

For some reason my samsung LCD TV won't allow me to zoom into anything that is oover 480i. Strange, is there a zoom function on the a3? I know certain HD DVD titles let you zoom with the a button. It just sucks that i have to output at 480i to get the widescreen image to fill the screen.