Question about 16:9 DVDs and menus

[Richard Iredale]

In a moment of weakness I broke down while in a Fry's Electronics store and we now own a 16:9 TV monitor (a 62" DLP box from Mitsubishi). I've had fun trying to learn what all the buttons do on the remote.

But what surprises me is this: when I put in a 4:3 DVD, what comes up on the wide screen is a 4:3 image with black pillars on each side i.e. a "pillarbox." That's expected. Okay, now put in a widescreen Hollywood movie. What comes up is still a pillarboxed 4:3 image but with the 16:9 image letterboxed inside it. To get it to fill the whole screen I have to run through the various resizing options until I find one called "Expand", which, sure enough, expands the 16:9 miniature image into one which fills the entire screen.

I would have thought that some flag would have automatically switched the monitor over to the 16:9 mode.

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Second observation:

When I am playing a Hollywood wide-screen movie in the expanded mode as outlined above, if I go to a menu I usually find that the menu thinks it's in 4:3 mode, and as a result the tops and bottoms of the menu are cut off on the screen (because the screen is in "expanded" mode). Am I doing something wrong here? Or is the menu for this movie authored in 4:3? Shouldn't one assume that a big-budget movie would have a big-budget authoring process where the menus are 16:9 format also? Have I not set something in the DVD player properly?

I don't know if it makes any difference, but I should mention that the monitor is being fed by a Toshiba DVD player via an S-video cable going into the "Line 1" connection on the back. I could try to hook up the Y/Pb/Pr component cables instead but assume that the monitor will behave the same.

[mpucoder]

You have to tell your DVD player that it is now connected to a widescreen display. Poke around the setup menus, there should be a choice somewhere for widescreen, 4:3 letterboxed, or 4:3 pan/scan.

[mrslacker]

Yes, set your player's display mode to 16:9. That's key for a widescreen TV, or even a 4:3 HD display that can do 16:9 mode. That way you're player doesn't waste it's vertical resolution output capabilities on black bars that it would insert in 4:3 mode.

With regards to the menus, I have found that a lot of DVD menus are widescreen, but the menu's domain stream attributes have automatic pan&scan enabled. I think this tells the player to crop the left and right of the 16:9 image. Don't be surprised if the menu gets displayed with those black pilars you noticed. So, if you are backing up any of your discs, maybe take a look at the menu attributes with PgcEdit. You might be able to get the menus to be displayed as widescreen by unchecking this option, if they aren't already.

mpucoder, How do these (Auto PS, Auto LB, LB) options function upon playback? I'm trying figure out how they work when combinations are selected. Surprisingly, search really let me down... this seems so basic.

[mpucoder]

If the player is set for a widescreen display you should see the widescreen version. Auto-LB and Auto-PS tell the player what 4:3 modes can be used for a 16:9 movie/menu. For auto-ps the video has to be encoded for pan/scan. For either auto-ps or auto-lb the appropriate subpictures and buttons must be available. These bits are 0 to enable, 1 to disable. If the player is set for a 4:3 display it will use whichever mode is enabled. If both modes are enabled then the player can choose according to your preference, ie if you set the display to "4:3 letterboxed" the player will choose auto-lb.

[mrslacker]

Thanks for the explanation! So the Auto options are intended as hints for dealing with widescreen material on 4:3 diplays. In that case, I think my Sony player is misbehaving. Lost in Translation's main menu is widescreen, with Auto-PS enabled. The player is configured for 16:9, but it still seems to respect this menu's PS setting, chopping the pretty background on the sides. I enabled Auto-LB and disabled Auto-PS, and the widescreen menu was displayed. I'll have to double check this when I get a chance.