Forcing Aspect Ratio during playback

[hcowan]

Hello,

I have been using GuiDVDAuthor to create a DVD. This particular DVD has two MPEG clips, one of which is 4:3 and the other is 16:9.

I set up a MultiTitleset project and created the DVD without any problems or errors. I tested the DVD by playing it back on a standard 4:3 CRT tv and everything looks good. The 4:3 clip displays fullscreen, and the 16:9 plays widescreen with the black bars at the top & bottom, like it should.

I then tried it out on a widescreen LCD TV. When viewing it in the default display mode (16:9), the 16:9 clip looks fine (as would be expected), but the 4:3 is stretched widescreen, as it should under this setting, but doesn't look very good.

So I set the TV to 4:3 mode, now the 4:3 clip looks good, displayed at fullscreen, BUT for some reason, the 16:9 clip is not presented as widescreen with the black bars at the top and bottom, but rather, it has been vertically stretched to fill the screen, which looks awful (everyone looks like stickmen).

I don't understand why under 4:3 mode, it won't display the 16:9 as widescreen, when it should (as it does on the 4:3 CRT TV).

So, my question is, is there any setting or option that I can use to force the TV to display the 16:9 clips as widescreen regardless of the TV mode?

Also, I did test the DVD on the computer using PowerDVD, and the same thing happens unless I select the "keep aspect ratio" option.

Thanks so much for the help,

Hugh

[SLK001]

There should be an option to enable "Force Letterbox" - somewhere.