full screen vs widescreen and letterbox

[thatartguy]

oh well if people prefer to hear Yesterday remixed in 1988 that's their choice

Now THERE'S an obscure reference! Oh, and I agree with you. (Trying to find my Beatles vinyl transfers.)

[Nala]

that tears it im gonna start saving my money for a widescreen tv

You don't need to own a widescreen TV to enjoy a movie in widescreen, all it means is when watching a widescreen film you get little bars at the top of the screen, it's no biggie.

Also even with a 16X9 widescreen TV you will still get black bars if the film if even wider widescreen like cinemascope! Or anything that is 16X9+!

Pardon my ignorance but what does 16x9 (16:9) mean?

[Luke]

Pardon my ignorance but what does 16x9 (16:9) mean?

It means the ratio of width to height is 16 to 9 (or 1.77778:1), instead of the "standard" television where the ratio is 4 to 3 (or 1.333:1).

[Nala]

Pardon my ignorance but what does 16x9 (16:9) mean?

It means the ratio of width to height is 16 to 9 (or 1.77778:1), instead of the "standard" television where the ratio is 4 to 3 (or 1.333:1).

Thanks. I measured our TV and it's width is 21 and height 16. Am I correct about how I measured our screen? It's a 27" TV.

[thatartguy]

I measured our TV and it's width is 21 and height 16. Am I correct about how I measured our screen? It's a 27" TV.

Normally, televisions are measured diagonally from one corner to the opposite corner (making your TV 27".) From the measurements you took your television is in 4:3 ratio, which is the standard. If you were to watch a widescreen DVD, the image on screen would display with the "black bars" on the top and bottom of your screen.

Personally, I watch movies with the lights out so I don't get any glare on the screen. You won't notice the "black bars" if you can't see the outside of the TV.

[deathie mouse]

16:9, a basic display shape or proportion, one that fits nicely into one of the three major basic movie shapes, or formats. (the other two being aproximaetely 4:3, and 21:9 )

dethi starts the stream

In the begining, Silent films were 1.3333 as wide as they were tall so that's called a 4:3 shape (Cus when you divide 4 by 3 it equals 1.33333)
When sound came in the 30's the shape/width changed slightly to 1.375 wide (the Academy ratio), but most people still refer to it as 1.33 or 4:3. When TV was invented maybe somebody forgot to tell them engineers that movies had changed to 1.375 several decades ago so they made the electrionic image be proportional to the Silent 1.33333 shape (Or maybe it was just easier to compute numbers and stuff in the simpler 4:3 )

In the 50's movies started to go widescreen to compete with TV, and the Standart Widescreen movies (which is one of the widescreen format techniques, cus aspect ratios are based in the techniques used to make the widescreen shape) fell between 1.66 and 1.85 wide with an aproximate average aspect ratio of 1.75 (the "Disney ratio"). The other widescreen movies were W I D E R (the Scope and 70mm movies) and those fell between 2.00 and 2.75 wide.

When many years later they were deciding for a ratio for the new HDTV standarts verious ratios (or shapes) for the displays were proposed. Some argued 1.50, some 1.66, some even wanted 2.00 (mostly Cinema people cus they've been shooting most films between 1.66 and 2.40 by then and they thought an average 2.00 shape would fit nicely for most of their movies) but the shape finally chosen was the 16:9 shape which is equal to 1.7777777777, or 1.78, which happens to be mathematically related to 4:3 cus 1.3333 x 1.3333 = 1.777777 and also happened to be almost the Standart Widescreen average of 1.75. Other reasons were that 1.78 is aproximately halfway between 1.33 (Silent/Academy/TV) and 2.40 (Cinemascope) so the black space wasted when showing Academy and Cinemascope movies on a 16:9 display would be just about equal; that on a 16:9 display you can put a big 1.33 image and 3 smaller 1.33 ones on its side; and that CRT manufacturers when the HDTV standard was chosen on the PREVIOUS century said that it would be too dificult to manufacture TV tubes wider than that then (in fact some just wanted 1.66). Of course almost a generation later HDTV is not totally here but we are on the age of DLP, LCD, and plasmas, so we could have had them any shape (like WIDER ) but we're still stuck with the quarter of a century old 16:9 "new" shape


4:3 and 16:9 also refers to the coding on the images on DVDs so some are coded to look proper in 4:3 shaped displays (usually Academy movies) and some are coded to look proper in 16:9 shaped displays (usually widescreen movies, including even WIDER than Standart Widescreen movies like 2.35-2.55 Cinemascope films) while utilizing the maximont amount of TV lines or pixels (Thats why 16:9 enhanced widescreen movies look better on 16:9 displays than widescreen movies that are letterboxed to look proper on 4:3 displays )

The extra wide Scope (and 70mm) films would look even better if they had proposed and made 21:9 displays (2.33 wide)

mpeg2 DOES have a provision for coding movies for that (Again more mathemathical trickery: as 1.33333 x 1.33333 = 1.777777, 1.77777 x 1.33333 = 2.37 aproximately, and 2.37 is near the average of all those little variations on Scope/70mm movies (2.00, 2.20, 2.25, 2.35, 2.39, 2.40, 2.55, 2.75, etc). So you could have 21:9 enhanced Scope DVDs (or Blu-rays) and watch them downconverted into letterbox on your 16:9 Display waiting for the day you bought your ultra megatronic 21:9 projector and saw them with 33% extra sharpness and resolution, the same as today people watch 16:9 enhanced widescreen movie DVDs on their 4:3 TVs before they get them 16:9 displays.


4:3, 16:9, 21:9

the three (aproxximate) basic format movie shapes:
Academy 1.38
Standart Widescreen 1.75
Cinemascope/Panavision 2.39

(minute differences between precise ratios within the 3 basic shapes and displays are negligible, just a few pixels here and there and usually eaten up by display overscan anyway)

end of stream

[Poppins#1]

So you could have 21:9 enhanced Scope DVDs (or Blu-rays) and watch them downconverted into letterbox on your 16:9 Display waiting for the day you bought your ultra megatronic 21:9 projector and saw them with 33% extra sharpness and resolution, the same as today people watch 16:9 enhanced widescreen movie DVDs on their 4:3 TVs before they get them 16:9 displays.


4:3, 16:9, 21:9

the three (aproxximate) basic format movie shapes:
Academy 1.38
Standart Widescreen 1.75
Cinemascope/Panavision 2.39

(minute differences between precise ratios within the 3 basic shapes and displays are negligible, just a few pixels here and there and usually eaten up by display overscan anyway)

end of stream

Yes 21:9 enhanced DVDs would have definitely been a theoretical possibility. But keep in mind, to maximize resolution for all ratios, DVDs would need to be encoded in three different ways: 4X3, 16X9, and 21X9. If they had chosen only two, say 4X3 and 21X9, then 1.85:1 movies would have less resolution due to black bars on the sides (for 21X9) and black bars on all 4 sides of standard TVs. So 21X9 enhancement as an additional feature would have been great had they done it from the beginning, but now it's too late to add it, as there would be no backwards compatability with existing players.