Why not all the DVDs have both standard and widescreen versions? Some of them do where either you have to flip the DVD to choose from standard to widescreen version or they give you an option in the DVD menu. But most of the DVDs come with widescreen versions, which I personally don’t like for viewing. I prefer standard version. What gives?
Various things. It’s partially a function of bitrate and max space on the disc. Putting two versions of the movie means that you either have less space for extras if you keep the bitrates decent, or you have to comprimise the quality of the video and audio by dropping the bitrate. It could also be that there is not a pan and scan version available, that the director insisted that the movie wasn’t pan and scan formatted and was actually listened to, or any other number of things.
For what it’s worth, widescreen is much much better than pan and scan. Widescreen is the aspect ratio as seen in theatres, so you get the entire picture. Pan and scan cuts parts of the picture in an attempt to get it from the nominal 1.85:1 ratio of widescreen to the 4:3 ratio of a TV screen. If you don’t like the bars in widescreen, might I suggest buying a widescreen TV?
As asterion points out, including the whole film twice takes up a lot of space; hence the once-common two-sided discs.
I remember reading (but no cite, sorry) that the two-sided discs have turned out to be more difficult and expensive to manufacture than originally expected. Maybe that explains why so many movies were two-siders in the early days of the format, and so few are now.
The DVD format is supposed to have provision to do “in-player” pan-and-scan. This feature allows the player to re-format a widescreen movie to pan-and-scan on the fly, perhaps even allowing the user to flip between wide-screen and pan-and-scan as the movie plays. I think this would be great, because I agree that widescreen isn’t essential for all movies, and because only one version of the film has to be included on the disc, saving a ton of disc space for other goodies. For some reason, though, I’ve never seen a disc that supports this. Has anyone else?
IIRC, you are referring to the zoom function on some DVD players. Pan and scan is performed by editors when the transfer is made, since they need to manually pan the image to keep the “action” in frame, and a DVD player can only zoom on one place and does not pan back and forth to acheive the same effect.
I would prefer that the studios keep producing a version of each, so I can get the original, unbutchered 
version along with the extra goodies, although places like Wal-Mart are pushing the studios pretty hard for just Pan and Scam. Ugh.
That, and two sided discs are annoying to handle. There is no non-face side to set them on, so either side can be easily scratched or become dirty. People just don’t like them. They are like friggin’ laserdiscs.
I’d imagine that in-player pan-and-scan would take a lot of effort on the part of the producers of the disc. You’re basically scripting the framing for every frame in a 2 hour long movie… I’d imagine there would be a performance hit, as well (considering that I see DVDs skip a bit without anything going on).
For the record, the industry is (slowly, very, very slowly) moving to the HDTV standard, including aspect ratio. Thank friggin’ god. Death to pan-and-scan. Have you ever seen some of the stuff that they cut out of pan-and-scan formats?
No, John, IIRC there actually is a feature on some DVD players (which only works if the DVD was mastered to support it) which will do on-the-fly pan & scan. I’ll try to scare up a cite for you this evening.
Ah, it wasn’t as hard to find as I thought.
http://www.dvdfile.com/news/viewpoints/reader_mail/1999/12_14.htm
:smack:
Thanks!
Great link, Knead, that’s exactly what I was talking about. It seems that like one or two other things about the DVD format, in-player pan-and-scan is only half-baked.
The article’s explanation that the pan-and-scan instructions would take up too much room on the disc is completely absurd (what are we talking about here, one or two bytes per frame?) but the other limitations (like horizontal pan and crop only) sound all too likely.
The reason I like standard format better is that the picture is bigger compared to widescreen. Yes, widescreen gives you more width of viewing but the picture is not relatively large. I prefer bigger picture over completed picture.
Thanks for the link, KTK.
I can sort of get widescreen into standard format by pushing zoom once or twice on the remote. This might make the credits off screen but the main flick should be fine.
Ewwwww!! You PREFER pan and scam? Yuck!
Double-plus-yuck.
Since we have a few DVD experts in the thread this novice would like to ask something related. I have no experience with DVDs and I just got a DVD drive for my computer. I had assumed a DVD was sort of like a CDROM except that it could hold larger files and I thought I could play the movies with MS Media Player. It turns out I was wrong. The computer sees files in there but does not recognize the file format and the drive did not come ith any software. What software do I need and where can I get it? (For free, I hope)
sailor, you mean VOB files?
You need DVD player software. Cyberlink PowerDVD is a good choice; it’s not free, but I believe there’s a demo you can download. Or as an alternative, you can decrypt the video (e.g., with DVD Decrypter) and convert it to another format that you can play… VCDHelp has more information.
My DVD drive (an AOpen model) came with PowerDVD, and I find it to be a quite-good player. As a student of drawing, cartoons, and animation I like being able to grab screenshots for later study.
But it’s the Disney DVDs that always ask to install their own player that get me. I know you can turn off the choice to autorun all inserted discs, but it there a way just to tell the Disney stuff to not run?
Windows XP has different autorun settings for each “type” of disc–DVD, audio, normal data, photo album, etc. You could just turn off the DVD disc autorun if you want, but I can’t think of way to only turn off Disney discs specifically.
If you don’t have XP, of course, it’s kind of moot.
At least it asks. Microsoft would just try to go ahead and do it…
I checked out PowerDVD but at $50 it is more than I am willing to pay. Heck, I paid less than that for the Liteon drive. I really do not need the DVD drive at all and I just bought it because it was cheap but I would not have bought it if I knew I had to buy some software to be able to use it. I am going to check with the store to see if there is some software they forgot to give me or return the drive.
sailor, you should definitely have received player software when you purchased the drive. Unfortunately, there are no freeware programs legally capable of playing DVDs. The DVD consortium only licenses decryption keys to companies at a hefty price.