> IMO, this was a non-story from day one.
Not quite a non-story though. It's garbage the film studios are giving bad copies to Netflix to stream. Bringing this up and complaining about it is a good first step to getting that fixed, right?
Not quite a non-story though. It's garbage the film studios are giving bad copies to Netflix to stream. Bringing this up and complaining about it is a good first step to getting that fixed, right?
I can't find the story now, but there was an instance of a set of "widescreen" DVD releases (my memory tells me they were from WB) which were 4:3 cropped releases, cropped yet again to 16:9 aspect - a small chunk of the original picture left at this stage... but as I say, I can't find this story so I may be misremembering.
Horizontal black bars on screen to correct aspect are common, vertical black bars are less acceptable for whatever reason (Aesthetics? Acclimatisation? Who knows?). My xbmc setup not only has a hybrid stretch+crop for 4:3 stuff on my widescreen TV, it also has a setting which stretches more towards the edges than the centre of the picture. Acceptable presentation for my old TV recordings and such but if someone handed me a Dr. Strangelove recording distorted similarly, I'd be less than impressed. I prefer to ruin the presentation on my own terms!
Another mode I use for presentation of 4:3 material on the wide TV is 14:9 + crop - this is essentially a halfway-to-fullscreen zoom mode I use for my old game consoles. This has never, in my experience, cut out any relevant action or HUD info as these games needed to be designed for ludicrously variable CRT overscan in the first place.