sorry the gal heh.
hmm so the way you guys describe it it is NOT 16:9 and it will be stretched inapropriatly on my monitor or my 60" had that i usually watch this stuff on? Im a bit confused because thats what it sounds like your saying then later you say it kinda does o_O
LOL, “stretched inappropriately” xD
If you do away with the assumption that image pixels must be square in shape, then it will make sense to you
The pixels on a monitor may be square, but on other devices this is not necessarily the case. On an anamorphic encode, the information is presented in an array of 704x480 pixels. You calculate the aspect ratio as 1.467
only if you assume that the pixels must be square in shape... and in this case they are not.
You're probably wondering
“how do the square pixels on my monitor display non-square pixel data then?” The answer: software re-scaling. This probably sets off alarms in your head about “possible loss of image data during scaling” and other dangers of software scaling, but seriously, you're not going to notice the difference much (unless your media player is using a sucky resizing algorithm like nearest-neighbour). Besides, this is the way the studio intended the video to be seen.
Of course, it is going to look terribly blocky or blur on a 60" screen, but all DVDs will look like that on a 60" screen anyway.
“So why even do this at all? Why can't the DVD just be released in native 16:9 aspect ratio?”Simply put, because widescreen ratios are not part of the
DVD-Video specification, they cannot be encoded in that form. DVD players conforming to the specifications would not be able to decode it. So anamorphic widescreen is really a little hack that allows storing widescreen video in a non-widescreen source ratio. Keep in mind that the DVD-Video specifications were released more than 10 years ago; there simply wasn't that much widescreen stuff then.
As for why people would even think of making movies or videos in a widescreen format... that is not a question I can answer >_> Just think of it as the zeitgeist of this era.
From this point on I'll have to refer you to the
wikipedia article and
other articles (note that this article was written back in 2000, with minor updates in 2006, and HD wasn't so widespread then), as well as other members who are more well-versed on anamorphic widescreen.
what looks off? cant you tell from the pics? im talkinga bout the ones halfway down on the comment page here
http://bakabt.me/details.php?id=146810&page=0#comments
the dvd ones look all squished and ugly, although for some reason the screenshots posted by the uploader look normal.. at least at fist glance
AFAIK most media players simply take the image data before scaling or pixel-shading is applied and save it as a screenshot. Hence, the image is not anamorphically scaled. If viewed as-is, they would look horizontally squished. If you rescaled the DVD screenshots to a 16:9 aspect ratio (i.e. 853x480), they would look normal.
If you see the word “anamorphic”, the video is almost definitely 16:9 widescreen, even if the source ratio (i.e. presented ratio of the video file) says otherwise.
Also around the mouth it is boxed instead of rounded like in img186. This can come from a few things.
One - Bad encoding or bad formatting of the encode
Two - Your monitor resolution. Remember standard TV resolutionis NOT always the same as monitor resolution. Some monitors even though they are wide screen are the same pixel count as TV resolution. This is because normally a Monitor has higher resolution, so this can cause and image to become compressed when displayed. What is the natural resolution of your monitor?
Three - Aspect ratio you have set for your PC.
With regards to detail differences between the TV and DVD versions (e.g. the different mouth shapes), those will not come from encoder filtering. I believe those scenes were simply reworked between the DVD and TV release. You'd notice that the eyes and cheek-lines are a little different as well; No encoding filter is able to change the image like that.
