LB 4:3 to 16:9

[Jeff Mott]

What is the actual point in performing this conversion? The vertical resolution is already lost; a resizer won't change that. However, keeping the letterbox (leaving a very large portion of the picture black) would probably leave you with fewer encoding artifacts. So I don't really see any benefit of this option. Could someone explain it to me?

[Boulder]

I guess it's for those who have a 16:9 TV and don't want to use the zoom feature. Also the artifacts will be upscaled when zooming so I'd rather scale the video myself instead of letting the TV do that.

[laserfan]

I have converted a couple of my letterboxed DVDs and frankly have not been able to see an improvement over my Sony's own Zoom feature (note of course that an A-B comparison is really hard to do given the TV needs to be cycled-back to Full mode).

But I have not given-up on conversions yet--as Boulder implies one SHOULD, given that a conversion occurs on a take-your-sweet-time-and-analyze-and-convert-on-a-frame-by-frame-basis (whew!) vs. the on-the-fly TV hardware zoom, be able to up-convert and improve PQ at the same time. This involves more filters than just the Resize filter, and that's the beauty of DVD-RB; it incorporates the ability to use filters...

[OvERaCiD23]

It solves the issue of having to change your TV's picture mode. Also, you make better use of the bits available, which is the whole idea of anamorphic encodes anyways.

[Video Dude]

This is my favorite feature of DVD-RB.

Did you ever try to zoom a 4:3 letterboxed 2:35:1 movie on a widescreen tv?

You end up cutting off about 20-25% from both the left and right sides when you zoom. You sometimes remove entire characters from the screen. You hear them speaking and you say, "Who said that?". Not to mention that the subtitles can't be seen because you zoomed in so much that they are off screen.

By using this LB 4:3 to 16:9 option you can watch the movie on a widescreen TV with full horizontal resolution without cropping huge amounts of the left and right sides by zooming.

[scharfis_brain]

CRT based TVs generally won't scale.
They just steer the distance of the scanlines to each other.

People find anamorphic images more pleasing, because the scanlines are more concentrated on the screen.