Old DVD player - a dumb question

Napoleon Plural

I've been watching DVDs on the flatshare's old Toshiba DVD player on the plasma. The widescreen fills the screen.

However, swapping the DVD player for my newer one, a combined CD player, I was perturbed to find that when, say, Diamonds are Forever fills the screen, it cuts off the credits! It's not the whole picture, unlike before. You can change the ration of course, and then I realise that the Bond films should be a much thinner letterbox style even on a widescreen plasma.

Are there any DVD players today that fill the screen without cutting out any of the picture? It's just a bit too thin to have it in the correct letterbox ratio.

Yours confusedly

NP

Loeffelholz

This kind of thing always annoys me. One thing you might want to do is check the 'set up' feature on the film menu, if there is one, and see if it can be changed there. The other option would be to check the instructions for the player---maybe there's a button you haven't found/used yet. Usually, I find it's something very simple that's right under my nose...but admittedly I'm no 'tech-head.'

I'm probably no help at all; sorry ;%

TonyDP

On most DVD players there is a menu setting that informs the DVD player what kind of a TV you have: widescreen or 4:3; poke around the DVD player's settings and make sure that it is set to widescreen.

Also, most widescreen TVs have various image stretching and cropping modes; poke around the TV's menu and make sure these are all turned off so that its displaying the entire signal from the DVD.

Once you've done that, you can then poke around with the menu options on either the TV or the DVD player to size the image to your liking. If DAF was filling your entire screen, then it must have been getting cropped in some way; my guess would be that the image was being zoomed so that the left and right portions were cropped off so I would play around with the DVD player's zoom feature (if it has one).



In answer to your second question, when watching movies, you'll never fill the screen entirely and also be able to view the whole image because the aspect ratios of the movies are almost always different from the TV. For example:

Your widescreen TV's aspect ratio is 1.78 to 1

Most Bond movies (including DAF) were shot anamorphically, which means they have an aspect ratio of 2.35 to 1. Since 2.35 is fairly larger than 1.78, you'll get fairly large horizontal black bars above and below the image, even on a widescreen TV.

TMWTGG was shot at an aspect ratio of 1.85 to 1. Since 1.85 and 1.78 are very close, the size of the black bars will be almost negligible.

DN, FRWL and GF were filmed at an older ratio of 1.66 to 1. That's actually a narrower ratio than your plasma, so instead of horizontal black bars, you'll get vertical black bars on the left and right to fill out the space.

So as you can see, there's no way to make all those different ratios fit into one TV without either distorting the image via cropping or stretching, or having black bars to fill the unused portion of the frame.

Napoleon Plural

Thanks Tony, I will try that! That said, I quite liked it filling the screen, and it didn't seem cropped on a lot of them... ie the credits were there.

Napoleon Plural

Okay, this is strange. For my old Special Edition of DAF, it certainly offers the thin letter box ratio, then 16:9 then 16:9 Pan And Scan. Not much difference between the last two, thin black lines along the bottom but 16:9 shows a bit more of the picture whereas the Pan and Scan cuts some of the credits out.

However, for my new DVD of Total Recall, it doesn't have any Letterbox format comparable to DAF... Surely at the cinemas it was just as panoramic and oblong? It does offer Letterbox but it's the same as the 16:9, while the 16:9 Pan And Scan fills my widescreen telly by cutting some of the picture out, though you can still see the credits.

TonyDP

I just did a quick google on Total Recall; it was filmed at an aspect ratio of 1.85 to 1 so it wasn't a full scope presentation like DAF (which was 2.35 to 1). That's why you're getting thin black bars with DAF but not Total Recall.

A lot of blockbusters were filmed at 1.85 to 1 as many filmmakers prefer that aspect ratio. Most of Steven Spielberg's stuff and even the early Burton and Schumacher Batman films were all shot at that ratio. Even Kubrick shot some of his stuff at 1.85 to 1.

Tilly Masterson 007

I believe this could be to do with the setting on the screen size.

There are various options such as "Widescreen, Cinema, Sport, Standard etc" so for the credits to fit in, I would try the "Cinema" option?

Just a thought!