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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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...

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.