When you go to the cinema, its full screen no stupid letterbox mode, so how come, every dvd i own (accept Tv series?) has always got a letterbox mode. The two black strips top and bottom. I heard its for Widescreen, but i have a widescreen television and if you put it on the different modes and it still has the black lines. Is their a decent Computer dvd player that can alter this and play it full screen? Post your thoughts and comments.
Are you playing the DVD on the computer or the television? DVDs support "anamorphic widescreen", which means DVDs that also have 16:9 capabilities. You just need to change a setting on the DVD player to output in 16:9.
i love dvds. what is so great are their features! if you buy a dvd you get subtitles included, while during vhs days you didn't or you had to buy a vhs video with the subtitles and when you didn't want subtitles from time to time it was something you could get rid of in a vhs. then there is also the skip of chapters. it's now easier to go from beginning to end or somewhere you'd like to watch. while vhs had you go from beginning all the way to where you wanted, so if you had a 3hr video, you'd have to fast forward all the contents upto the point of where you'd like to watch. then there is the rewinding part. dvds there were no need to rewind from the beginning of the video once you were done watching the film. this was needed for all vhs videos, i still remember the days where you'd have to go to a video store and rewind the tapes before returning them, wher upon if you don't rewind them they'll charge you a fee. then there's that crispiness in the video. regardless if you use component or composite cables, you'd have a sense of the picture quality being a higher step then compared to vhs. audio dubs. right one right from all the anime freaks! sometimes you watch a foreign film and prefer the english dub because you don't feel like reading the subtitles and then there are days where you do prefer the original voices. this was something you didn't get in vhs videos. then there is also that dual screen format. some dvd's have the ability to go widescreen or fullscreen. something that you don't find in vhs videos. there is also the size of the media. dvd's are discs and are light to carry and store. vhs took a huge space on peoples homes and are heavy. the one problem with dvd's being runned on the pc is that you require a dvd encoder or decoder [don't remember which is which]. but it's the codec that allows you to watch dvd movies on your pc. they scratch and it can make it unreadable for the dvd player to read the data on the disc.
VHS tapes deteriorate as well, I have a copy of the lion king from 1994, it's now more or less unwatchable because of faded colours and 'snow'
that too. if you put on a star trek video in dvd, it'll look like it's being air on tv [picture quality is clear and very colorful] while if you used a vhs tape, it would have looked extremely aged.
My VHSs have closed captioning which I can enable. I have 5 of the 6 Star Wars movies in VHS. I don't really have much in DVD; we used Netflix for a while, then transitioned to full-time Demonoid.
not all VHS tapes have closed captioning, in the UK the majority didn't. Additionally, extra hardware was required to decode and display the captions.
DVDs take up less space too, if all the movies I have were on video tape I'd have no space for anything else.
The wide screen format is so that you can see the whole film on your television, because the shape of a movie screen is different than the shape of your TV. The black strips are there only because that's the shape the film was originally, that way you get to see the whole film as it was originally intended. Full screen tapes and DVDs have been formatted to fit your TV that means they literally cut off the edges of the film so that it has the same aspect as your TV or monitor, sometimes you will see the film "pan and scan" when it's formatted so that one of the actor doesn't get half his face cut off. What it all adds up to is that something is lost in full screen. You aren't seeing the whole picture. Instead I think you should be complaining about how it's taken over 50 years for the TV to catch up to the movie screen(Digital HD TV). The problem is all those old wide screen DVDs and VCR tapes don't know that they're hooked up to a TV with the proper aspect so even viewed on the right shaped TV it still has the black strips on the top and bottom. If I'm not mistaken, some DVDs(or DVD players?) have the option to set the aspect of the film correctly, I don't own a HD TV yet so I haven't had any with them to say for sure.
Wow Born2killx, I never thought that in this day, age & generation there are still a few who appreciate the classic VHS format. That kinda makes me smile because I have the three Indiana Jones movies on VHS
haha you guys are kidding!? FRIENDS, indiana jones, lion king and star wars? the last time a saw a VHS movie was GODZILLA... like... 10+ yrs ago...
The Lion King was (is) an awesome movie. I went to the theater to see it twice. I love DVD. But as much as I love DVD, I love Blu-ray even more. Blu-ray does to DVD what DVD done to VHS.
