Wanted: DVD player able to beat the "letterbox blues"

[bac]

Greetings, all!

I'm one of the growing band of DVD junkies that have lashed out on a widescreen TV. 16:9 anamorphic titles now look soooo good it's very hard to go back to anything less.

The main gremlins in my DVD universe now are 4:3 letterbox titles. While you can use the zoom feature on the widescreen TV to remove all the black bars and fill the screen, the result is very grainy and starts to look more like a VCR recording.

If you zoom the image digitally on the DVD player, the resulting picture is much better, but cut off at the sides. This sort of defeats the whole reason for having a widescreen telly in the first place.

In my ignorance, I can't see why DVD players don't offer a "vertical zoom only" feature. This would allow the image to be rescaled along the y axis of the frame (height), removing the letterbox bars while leaving the x axis (width) alone.

This would result in a pseudo-anamorphic 4:3 image which could then be viewed in the correct aspect ratio using the 16:9 mode on a widescreen TV.

None of the players I've looked at seem to have this type of feature - am I the only person to think this would be a useful thing?

Does anyone know if such a player is out there or can tell me why not?

[jokiin]

Can you define what you mean by 4:3 letterbox titles, some examples of titles maybe? What sort of TV are you using, I have a widescreen set also but I can alter the picture via the set, this is not something that I do though, I would rather maintain the aspect ratio and have black bars instead of distorting the picture and losing the bars. As you said the picture gets grainy which is more noticable with a bigger set (mines 146cm)

[bac]

By letterbox, I'm talking about DVDs where the content is encoded as 16:9 or 2.35:1 or whatever, but with black bars top and bottom encoded as part of the frame:

.______________
|_____________|
|.....content.....|
|_____________|
|_____________|



On a normal 4:3 TV, this isn't a problem, as DVD players automatically letterbox an anamorphic title anyway if you set your player's output to 4:3 letterbox or 4:3 pan & scan. However, on a widescreen set, you end up with a small picture in the centre with black bars all around. Typically you use the TV's zoom function to remove the black bars while maintaining the correct aspect ratio, but the picture becomes very grainy due to the lack of lines of actual picture content the set has to work with.

Most recent R4 titles are anamorphic widescreen, which is good. Unfortunately, some R4 and R1 releases are still in letterboxed widescreen format. Examples are:

- Titanic (R1 & R4)
- Spaceballs (R1 & R4)
- History of the World Part I (R1)
- Four Weddings and a Funeral (R1)

Titanic in particular looks really bad on a large widescreen set. The movie's aspect ratio is 2.35:1 encoded as letterbox on the standard DVD frame. This means that less than half the DVD frame is picture content and the rest is black bars!

[redbears]

This is the same issue most Laser Discs have on Widescreen TV's. It is basically a 4:3 sized picture being output, so you have to use the TV's zoom controls to remove the black bars on the side of the picture.

Very few modern DVD titles have this problem, I have Four Weddings R1 and it looks fine on my WS TV, I thought it was 1.85:1 though?

[jokiin]

Originally Posted by bac

By letterbox, I'm talking about DVDs where the content is encoded as 16:9 or 2.35:1 or whatever, but with black bars top and bottom encoded as part of the frame:

.______________
|_____________|
|.....content.....|
|_____________|
|_____________|



On a normal 4:3 TV, this isn't a problem, as DVD players automatically letterbox an anamorphic title anyway if you set your player's output to 4:3 letterbox or 4:3 pan & scan. However, on a widescreen set, you end up with a small picture in the centre with black bars all around. Typically you use the TV's zoom function to remove the black bars while maintaining the correct aspect ratio, but the picture becomes very grainy due to the lack of lines of actual picture content the set has to work with.

Most recent R4 titles are anamorphic widescreen, which is good. Unfortunately, some R4 and R1 releases are still in letterboxed widescreen format. Examples are:

- Titanic (R1 & R4)
- Spaceballs (R1 & R4)
- History of the World Part I (R1)
- Four Weddings and a Funeral (R1)

Titanic in particular looks really bad on a large widescreen set. The movie's aspect ratio is 2.35:1 encoded as letterbox on the standard DVD frame. This means that less than half the DVD frame is picture content and the rest is black bars!

What TV do you have, I have yet to find a widescreen DVD title that gives me bars on either side, the only stuff that gives bars either side is 4:3 full frame in which case there are no bars top and bottom and VHS tapes that are 4:3 with a widescreen picture encoded in 4:3 format (god knows who thought that was a good idea). I have Titanic R1, I'll try it tonight and let you know how it goes. Do you have the output on your DVD player and the input on your TV both set to widescreen? My TV is auto sensing, if I had the display set to 4:3 and I send a widescreen source to the input it automatically changes to widescreen display.

[bac]

I have a Thomson 76cm widescreen TV and my dvd player is set to widescreen output. All that means, though is that the player will pass the video "as is" to the TV, i.e. it will refrain from reformatting an anamorphic title.

The best test to illustrate what I mean is to force your widescreen TV to 4:3 mode - you will then have vertical black bars on the left and right of the picture. If the DVD title you're playing is anamorphic, the picture will fill the frame vertically, but everyone will look tall & thin. You then correct this by switching the TV to 16:9 mode, which stretches the picture horizontally and restores the correct aspect ratio.

However, if you are viewing a letterboxed widescreen title, the picture in 4:3 mode on your widescreen TV will have black bars on all sides. Given this, you really only have two options: (regardless of how good the TV is)

1. Switch the TV to 16:9 mode to stretch the picture horizontally and eliminate the black bars on the sides of the frame. This produces a good quality image, but the aspect ratio is no longer correct (everyone looks short & fat).

2. Use the zoom function on the TV to eliminate all the black bars. This maintains the correct aspect ratio, but the TV has to stretch an image which previously occupied roughly half the screen to take up the whole available real estate.

Different TVs will be able to zoom images with varying results - you would expect a $4000 Sony set to do a better job than my $900 Thomson. But at the end of the day, I believe my point is still valid - it makes much more sense, and you will end up with a better result if the image is rescaled digitally inside the DVD player rather then getting the display device to massage the analogue video signal.

If this were not so, there would not be such a good market in separate video rescaling boxes and high end projectors with rescaling hardware built into them.

The hardware inside a standard DVD player certainly has enough grunt to do the job - nearly every unit has a basic X-Y zoom function. I just don't think manufacturers have taken the rapid adoption of widescreen TVs into account when designing the feature sets for their players.

For a better summary of what I'm talking about, have a look at this page:

http://www.htexplained.com/abridged/Chap%202.htm

especially the sections headed "Widescreen Images on 4:3 TVs" and "Widescreen Images on 16:9 TVs".

The key quote from the above page is: "Some high-end DVD players can zoom a letterboxed 4:3 image so the TV doesn’t have to; with these the TV sees a non-anamorphic letterboxed widescreen image as an anamorphic one, and no TV resolution is lost."

This is what I'm after! Any ideas on where to get it in an affordable player?

[bac]

Looks like I've answered my own question ;-)

The Panasonic DVD-S35 has a feature called "4:3 Aspect" which allows you to "select how to show images made for 4:3 aspect screens on a 16:9 aspect television".

Tried this out in a shop and it works great, provided the DVD disc identifies itself correctly as 4:3 letterbox.

[vannostrom]

Those DVD's are non-anamorphic. You need should have an aspect ratio button of some sorts on your TV, just choose the one that fits best.

It will look grainy but what the hell....at least it's not 4:3.

[bac]

Yep, there is a button on the telly, but the results are *much* less grainy when you do the vertical stretch inside the DVD player than on the TV.

Think about it - the DVD player can manipulate the original digital data at its source, whereas the poor old telly has to try and massage the output analogue scan lines...

[pepito]

The new LG DF8900P player has this feature you seek

[bac]

Originally Posted by pepito

The new LG DF8900P player has this feature you seek

Yup, thanks to all the DF8900P owners who posted to the threads for this player over in the DivX forum

Just to triple check, can you vertically stretch the video on any DVD you play?

The Panasonic "S" series players also have this feature, but it only works if the DVD is flagged as letterboxed in the MPEG stream - many letterboxed DVD titles don't set the flags in the headers properly