Since I got a HD television I’ve noticed something about the DVDs I view on it. Some of the older DVD releases display on the screen in a much smaller box than the more recent releases which fill the screen by default. My DVD player allows me to zoom the image up to a size that will fill the screen when I view one of these older DVDs, but doing so results in degradation of the image.
I’m not talking about aspect ratio here. I’m not talking about Blue Ray or the other new HD format DVDs, I’m talking about the original standard DVDs. Why is the resolution so much lower on these older releases? Wasn’t there a standard resolution established for commercially sold DVDs at the beginning of the DVD revolution? Is it just the fact that nobody anticipated the invention of HD televisions when these DVDs were released? Is there anything to look for on the packaging that indicates a lower/higher resolution?
For movies that are wider than 3:4 (pretty much anything released theatrically since the 1960s), there are two ways that DVDs can be manufactured:
The first is anamorphic widescreen, in which the image is compressed horizontally into a standard 3:4 video signal. Your DVD player detects and expands the signal to 16:9. On a widescreen TV, the signal fills the whole screen. (However, if the movie is in a very wide format like 2.35:1, then there will still be some letterboxing visible as this is even wider than 16:9). On a 3:4 TV, the DVD player adds the letterboxing to the signal.
If they don’t use anamorphic widescreen, then the DVD may have the letterboxed image recorded as a plain 3:4 video on the disc, with the black bars as part of the actual recorded video. This is rather disastrous for people with a 16:9 TV. The TV will letterbox the 3:4 signal with vertical bars on the sides, and display the DVDs own black bars on the top and bottom of the 3:4 box.
Needless to say, they usually don’t make DVDs like that any more, thank God. Your TV likely has a “zoom” button to deal with this. That will blow up the signal to take up most of the screen, but it will look like crap.
Not true; the spec allows for a range of resolutions, although the one you mention is by far the most common on commercial releases (along with 720x576).
friedo’s explanation seems the more plausible at the moment, however, since the DVD player should automatically be scaling the DVD output according to what output you’re using from the player itself.
Yes, of course the anamorphic explanation is the right one… sorry, I just got caught up with that word “resolution” and my brain couldn’t function past that. Ignore me and listen to friedo.
Incidentally, one thing should be mentioned, since randwill says this has happened since he (she?) got a HD television: if you haven’t changed a setting in your DVD player since you got the new TV, you may not be getting the best picture possible. Go through your DVD player’s menus until you find an option for television type. It may still be set to “4:3 Letterbox” or something similar. Change that setting to “16:9”. This will clue in your player to the fact that you have a nice widescreen TV and you want it to display all the extra pretty lines that anamorphic DVDs contain. Your picture will be much improved.
And yes, many older DVDs were released in non-anamorphic widescreen versions. These have to be zoomed to look proper, and they’re not nearly as sharp as anamorphic DVDs. Back in the early days of DVD (1998, 1999, somewhere in there), there were some studios that either didn’t want to go to the extra effort to make anamorphic releases, or they actually believed that making their DVDs anamorphic would degrade the picture on 4:3 screens (Criterion didn’t put out anamorphic DVDs for several years for this reason). Hell, in the early days, some studios hadn’t decided whether they’d release movies on DVD at all! I remember buying The Mask of Zorro, a movie I couldn’t care less about, just to do my part to bump up sales numbers to prove to Spielberg that DVD was a format worth pursuing.
Anyway, now I’m rambling like an old coot. Check your DVD player’s settings, if you haven’t already, and see what a difference it makes.
No, I specifically said I’m NOT talking about aspect ratio. I know that standard television is 3:4 and displays gray bars to fill the space at the sides on my widescreen HD TV. Just like a widescreen 16:9 DVD picture displays with black bars at the top and bottom on an old standard tube TV.
But a newer DVD of a theatrical widescreen movie will display across the entire surface of the HD TV, filling the entire screen with the widescreen picture, no distortion. Sometimes I’ve had “wider screen” movies display across the HD widescreen surface with a small amount of black at the top and bottom.
I received a DVD of “The Last Emperor” today, not a copy or a booleg, but the 1998 Artisan commercial release. My screen is 22" wide by 12 1/2" high (a 26" screen). The movie displays as 17 1/4" wide by 7 1/2" tall surrounded by black (not gray) by default. With the remote for the DVD player I can enlarge (Zoom) the image in several increments; 1.2, 1.3. 1.5 and then 2, which fills the screen left to right but with substantial image degradation, so it is obviously a lower resolution than a DVD that will fill the screen by default (no zooming to enlarge it). Again, none of these things I am talking about stretch or squeeze the image, so I’m not talking about AR.
As Friedo already noted above, this is due to letterboxing. The black bars on the top and bottom of the picture are actually recorded on the disk. Obviously this is going to take up a good amount of picture resolution.
It seems that the DVD is non-anamorphic: http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/thelastemperor.php. The letterboxing is hard-coded into the DVD and there’s really nothing you can do about aside from zooming the image like you did. Newer DVDs are usually anamorphic, which means some additional information is coded into the disc to make use of the full (or almost full) height of the screen.
Yep, that sounds like what’s going on exactly. So in a case like that, there will probably never be a DVD version suitable for my current set-up. The next time a version of “The Last Emperor” is released it’ll probably be in DVD-HD or Blue Ray and skip the step I’m in right now.
DVD-18 is simply a double-sided, dual layer DVD. You’ll sometimes see double-sided discs; often one side will have the full screen version of a film while the other will have the widescreen version. I am not sure how you can determine whether a DVD is dual layer aside from the occasional “hiccough” during playback when the player switches layers.
They’re referring to the disc’s storage capacity rounded to the gigabyte. There’s DVD-5, single layer, single side, DVD-9, double layer, single side, DVD-10, single layer, double side, and DVD-18, double layer, double side. Double sided discs work like records, you have to take them out of the player and flip them over to access the data on the other side. For some reason, double sided discs seem to be somewhat rare.
According to Amazon , this is a widescreen with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. It doesn’t indicate if it’s anamorphic or not. I would suggest, as has been said above, to check to be sure your DVD player knows that you have a 16:9 TV. There should be some menu that says “TV type” or ratio, or something. Also, are you connecting the DVD player to the TV with component cables or using a composite (or S-video) cable? It may be that, in order to display the widescreen content properly, your DVD player needs digital output to the TV. Check also to see what your TV is supposed to do with 4:3 signals. You may have the choice to strectch it to 16:9. That may help improve the picture without an enormous loss in quality. I would bet that zooming at the TV is better than zooming at the DVD player.
Good luck. When buying new DVD’s always get the anamorphic widescreen version whenever you have a choice.
If you put the disc in a computer, the disc’s data capacity will give it away. Also, in my experience, double layered discs have a golden tint to the data surface, while a single layer disc appears silver.
They used to be a lot more common, but they were more difficult to manufacture and had much higher error rates. As the price of manufacting single-sided DVDs decreased, it became much cheaper to press two single-siders than one double-sider, so they don’t make them any more.
Thanks for the tips. DVD player and TV are connected with HDMI cable and DVD player is correctly set for the TV. As we’ve pretty much established, it’s just a deficient DVD and as it’s the only version of the director’s cut of “The Last Emperor” I know of, that’s that. Actually , the DVD is out-of-print, so I’m lucky to have it at all.