Improperly flagged non 16x9 DVD's (1 Viewer)

[Neil Joseph]

What do you do when a non 16x9 DVD displays in the middle of a 16x9 screen (with black bars on all 4 sides)? Although I always hated non 16x9 DVD's, I still have a few in my collection and 5 of them are not correctly flagged. Titanic and Deep Impact are two of them as well as 3 other fluff titles from Disney. My player is a JVC XV-S500 and my display is a Sony 11HT projector.

Thanks

 

[Brian L]

Well, I think it depends on how your player and projector get along.

My set (Pioneer WS) allows me to change the display mode (full, 4x3, two different linear blow-ups) for any source other than a HD 1080i.

So for non-anamorphic letter box material, I can choose from the two different linear blow-ups. They only differ in the amount it blows the image up. The first mode (Cinema wide I think they call it) works great for 1.85 stuff, while Zoom works for 2.35 stuff.

This gets rid of the "bars on all sides" problem.

Now, if you player is progressive, and your set locks into full mode when getting a progressive input, you will either need to switch the player to interlaced out for those titles, or use whatever aspect ratio control your player may have.

BGL

 

[Don Munsil]

Neil, you should set up your JVC for 16x9 Auto and not 16x9 Normal. This will tell the player not to windowbox 4:3 DVDs and zoom non-anamorphic letterboxed DVDs. You'll then need to use the aspect controls on the 11HT to change aspect ratios.

There are two reasons for this:

- The one you've noted - not all discs are flagged incorrectly (in our sampling, we found that more than 35% of letterboxed discs are not correctly flagged as letterboxed).

- Because of the way the 11HT samples the video, windowboxing 4:3 discs in the player produces a lower-resolution image. The 11HT only samples 720 times across a scan line. If you feed the projector the full-resolution signal with no windowbox bars, all 720 samples will be image data, and that resolution will be maintained even if you change to "normal" aspect in the projector. If you put the windowbox bars on in the player, then fewer of the 720 samples will be devoted to the picture, producing a marked quality downgrade. You can see this easily on the resolution pattern in Avia, as well as any 4:3 ratio movie.

In general, it's best to do aspect ratio control in the projector. It's too bad, because it's a lot easier when the player selects the appropriate aspect automatically.

One day, they'll get all of this stuff right. I hope.

Don

 

[Neil Joseph]

Thanks. I will set the player to 16x9 auto and experiment with the pj settings. Other than this quirk, I am liking this DVD player which does not exhibit chroma issues among other things.