"Enhanced for Widescreen TVs" the new Fullscreen?

[gonzalimator]

I was wondering about the term "Enhanced for Widesreen TVs".

Is this the new "Fullscreen"?

Example: When I went to the theatre to see War of the Worlds, it was projected with a nice and wide aspect ratio, I assumed it was 2.35:1. When I got the widescreen DVD, it filled my widescreen TV without any black bars so it was now 1.78:1. Have they trimmed off the edges in a pan and scan style for widescreen TVs?!?! I feel cheated! I buy widesceen movies to get the entire film frame and I swear that there are some movies out there being released as widescreen that have been modified to fill widescreen TVs. What's worse is that sometimes the aspect ratio is not on the DVD cover and I found both 2.35:1 and 1.78:1 on these "enhanced" DVDs.

Has anyone else noticed this? Has this question already been addressed? Got any links to dicussions on this subject? (I couldn't narrow my search in the forums when "widescreen" was one of the terms). Thanks.

[drewzor]

deleted

[redwudz]

I think they can pretty much call it what they want. If you do a forum search for 'aspect ratio' you might get some better hits. Like this one in our 'HOW TO' section: https://www.videohelp.com/forum/userguides/174200.php

But this is may be what they are talking about:
From http://www.crutchfieldadvisor.com/learningcenter/home/dvd_glossary.html#anamorphic

Anamorphic
A type of widescreen display format commonly found on DVD movies. It is optimized for playback on a TV with 16:9 aspect ratio (or TVs with a "vertical squeeze" viewing mode like Sony's 16:9 Enhanced). On a standard TV, anamorphic material looks horizontally squeezed. Anamorphic DVDs are often labeled on their cases "enhanced for 16x9 televisions," "enhanced for widescreen televisions," "16x9 anamorphic," or "anamorphic widescreen."

[manono]

War Of The Worlds (2005) was 1.85:1 in the movie theater. I can't speak for the projectionist at your movie theater, but that's how it was supposed to be. It's also 1.85:1 on the R1 16:9 DVD.

[guns1inger]

I haven't seen any 2.35 : 1 movies cropped this way, but I have seen a few 1.85 : 1 zoomed to fit. The R4 release of Gorky Park correctly describes the movie as 1.85, but the disc is in fact 1.78.

I raised this in a post a few weeks back, and someone posted a link to an IMDB listing that showed the original theatrical AR, and the subsequent DVD release AR, where they were not the same. The list was longer than I would like. Unfortunately I can't find the post right at the moment.

[gonzalimator]

Thanks everyone for your replies.

I found at IMDB a link to technical specifications in the menu on the left of the page. I just went through some of my questionable DVD titles and checked the aspect ratio on IMDB and found that the movies that I thought should've been 2.35:1 were actually 1.85:1 which on a widescreen TV pretty much fills the screen. I did as drewzor suggested and ripped the DVD and checked to see what it looked like. I found 6 pixels of black at the top and bottom of the picture, very close to the 10 pixels at the top and bottom I expected for a 1.85:1 anamorphic DVD.

@redwudz, thanks for the links. I know all about anamorphic widescreen and I actually have in my bookmarks DJRumpy's aspect ratio guide. It has certainly helped me in the past with various projects. I figure any modern widescreen DVD is anamorphic/enhanced, it would be weird to find a DVD that was actually 4:3 with hard coded black bars to make them 1.78, 1.85, or 2.35:1.

I'm going to start checking the IMDB for aspect ratios before buying my DVDs so that I know what to expect when I watch them. I will expect 1.85:1 widescreen to fill my TV.

Thanks again folks.

[energy80s]

All "Enhanced for Widescreen TVs" actually means is that it is anamorphic 16:9 rather than letterboxed (hard matte encoded) 16:9. What aspect ratio the programme may have been converted from is irrelevant, it could be anything from 14:9 to over 21:9 - but that's a whole other topic!!