I'm watching Seinfeld on my local Fox affiliate right now, and it appears to be in HD. Am I right, or does my aspect ratio need to be adjusted? I tried that, and the picture looks squished in 16:9 and 4:3.

Sony remastered Seinfeld into HD from its original film elements. They cropped it to a 16:9 aspect ratio for the new syndication run.

I didn't think they actually cropped anything. There's an old thread somewhere around here that shows the difference between the SD broadcast and HD.

Isn't it that they took the open matte shot and cropped off the top and bottoms?

Here's a thread on it:

http://forums.highdefdigest.com/hdtv...d-finally.html

It depends on the episode. I watched (downloaded) almost all of the HD episodes and I did notice that in certain episodes are cropped heavily, but at the bottom of the screen. I remember not being able to see the entire "Sack Lunch" poster in any shot.

What they did for these for the most part is cropped the top slightly, cropped the bottom more than slightly, and then expanded the left and right sides a little bit.

Here's an example, showing the 16x9 overlaid onto the 4x3:

This is a screen capture from 8:35 in the video in my previous post:



This new version is an absolute disgrace. It goes completely against the vision of the people who created the original version.

The same thing is true for this screenshot from 8:02 in the video:

That's why I still have my Seinfeld DVD series set. Just my preference, but I'd rather have the original framing than HD resolution.

People bitched about the same thing with The Wire. I don't mind at all. If it's not your preference, then at least there's old releases out there with the original OAR.

Me too, for that and for all the extras. But if I want to watch one or two episodes without any fuss or muss (digging up my DVDs, sitting through all the FBI warnings, etc. I'll admit to just streaming them even though the framing is all jacked up. (hopefully Alan Smithee doesn't read this! )