No Country Old Men Collector's Ed. Oddity?
 

I just bought No Country For Old Men Collector's Edition and noticed that the extras were distorted-looking.

It looks like the source was native 4:3 and encoded as 16:9 anamorphic. There is no pillar-boxing as the entire image fills the entire 16:9 frame.

The movie and menu look fine as they are proper anamorphic 16:9.

Anyone else notice this or is it just my set-up? Did they neglect to pillar-box the 4:3 extras before doing the anamorphic encode?

Re: No Country Old Men Collector's Ed. Oddity?
 

Hm. That sounds a little weird. Are there a lot of extras on the disc with the movie ? Maybe they just wanted to cram so much on the disc that they forgot to format the video properly. Or maybe the flags in the film are set wrongly.

Re: No Country Old Men Collector's Ed. Oddity?
 

You've got something set wrong and either your TV or Blu-ray player are stretching the image to fill. The extras lay just fine for me.

Re: No Country Old Men Collector's Ed. Oddity?
 

I have the Blu-ray machine running component video out to a CRT 1080i 16:9 enchanced TV.

I wonder if it has something to do with the extras being 480p and not being able to up-convert to 1080i through the component cables because of the copy protection embedded in the disc?

Re: No Country Old Men Collector's Ed. Oddity?
 

I imagine it's a setting on your BD player. Between my two Sony models, there's one that always plays extras all distorted while the other plays them in their original aspect ratio. I can never remember what setting I need to change. :)

Re: No Country Old Men Collector's Ed. Oddity?
 

I think you're right. I too am running component video to a 1080i set and my PS3 always stretches 4:3 standard video to fill the 1.78:1 frame. However, my region-free Momitsu clone displays 4:3 SD extras correctly on the same set up.

Re: No Country Old Men Collector's Ed. Oddity?
 

Yeah I think that may be the case. I played a 21 Jump Street Disc released by Millstream which I don't think is copy protected and it pillar-boxed the show for 4:3 making it look correct.

However when I play a major studio 16:9 anamorphic release something switches off the automatic 16:9 enhancement setting on the TV to show the film completely filling up the 4:3 screen with the picture distorted.

I think this may be what's happening to the 4:3, 480p copy-protected footage on the No Country For Old Men disc.

Just a hunch...

Re: No Country Old Men Collector's Ed. Oddity?
 

Problem solved. Had a chance to sit down and tinker with the BR settings and got it to work.

There's a setting called "Screen Format" which gives the options "Original" and "Fixed Aspect Ratio". I changed it from "Original" to "Fixed" and it corrected the 4:3 footage.

It's still odd that the regular DVDs I played in the machine pillar-boxed the 4:3image on the "Original" setting while the Blu-ray disc 4:3 footage did not.