[OT] Why do so few people understand aspect ratios?

[Scott Allen]

On 27 May 2010 13:34, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Letterboxing is required by the display (ie DVD players add it, not the
> DVD itself).

A few, mostly early, widescreen DVDs were produced in 4:3 format with
the top and bottom black bars actually added to the DVD content
itself. A copy of the first Mission Impossible with Tom Cruise, that I
rented, was done this way. I've also seen a few others but I can't
recall the titles.

It's true, though, that the vast majority of widescreen DVDs are
anamorphically encoded, with a flag that indicates that  black bars
are to be added top and bottom for 4:3 TVs or the image should be
stretched to fill the screen for 16:9 TVs.

Note that on a DVD you can only indicate that the DVD is 4:3 or 16:9
so if the aspect ratio is something other than these two, e.g. the
popular 2.35:1, then black bars are still added to the image itself.
The same goes for Blu-ray.

-- 
Scott A.
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists