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

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, May 28, 2010 at 06:58:22AM -0400, Scott Allen wrote:
> 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.

Yeah they do have limited supported resolutions on DVD and BlueRay.
At least they have more than one.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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