cdtm
I found an old dvd of Space Balls I bought years ago, and decided to try watching it on an lcd. On the back of the box, it says the dvd is "letterboxed,1.85:1", and also "fullscreen".
So, I insert it in my player, and it boots up at the "native" aspect ratio, which of course means a tiny image in the middle of the screen, with big black borders on all sides. I go to my player video options, and enable "letterbox", and.... everything becomes distorted. The Space Ball 1's engines and the sun on the desert should be circles, but instead they become stretched horizontally, making them look like elongated ovals.
Finally, I test the full stretch option, expecting the worst, and to my surprise circles take their proper shape again. Granted, the image looks a little washed out, but that's to be expected when you upscale a poor quality transfer.
So, what's going on? A "fullscreen", "letterboxed" dvd should not look right when stretched to full screen on a widescreen lcd, should it?
For that matter, doesn't letterboxing usually mean black bars on the tops and bottoms of the screen as part of the video? A process they started with vhs tapes and such, to ad-hoc a proper aspect ratio? Yet there's no bars to be seen. And why would it say "Letterbox", yet next to it say "Fullscreen"? Those are two entirely different formats, and the DVD menu doesn't contain options to alter the video in any way.
Wondering if the dvd box itself has wrong information on it (We're talking about one of those super economy jobs where they don't even bother with art on the dvd surface.. It looks like a disk out of a lazy bootleggers collection.)
So, I insert it in my player, and it boots up at the "native" aspect ratio, which of course means a tiny image in the middle of the screen, with big black borders on all sides. I go to my player video options, and enable "letterbox", and.... everything becomes distorted. The Space Ball 1's engines and the sun on the desert should be circles, but instead they become stretched horizontally, making them look like elongated ovals.
Finally, I test the full stretch option, expecting the worst, and to my surprise circles take their proper shape again. Granted, the image looks a little washed out, but that's to be expected when you upscale a poor quality transfer.
So, what's going on? A "fullscreen", "letterboxed" dvd should not look right when stretched to full screen on a widescreen lcd, should it?
For that matter, doesn't letterboxing usually mean black bars on the tops and bottoms of the screen as part of the video? A process they started with vhs tapes and such, to ad-hoc a proper aspect ratio? Yet there's no bars to be seen. And why would it say "Letterbox", yet next to it say "Fullscreen"? Those are two entirely different formats, and the DVD menu doesn't contain options to alter the video in any way.
Wondering if the dvd box itself has wrong information on it (We're talking about one of those super economy jobs where they don't even bother with art on the dvd surface.. It looks like a disk out of a lazy bootleggers collection.)