B5 Moment.

Okay, I'll admit that I have never set my DVD player to P&S output, and checked to see what came out. But, my instruction manual clearly shows the sides being cut off of the frame in that mode, and no top and bottom bars. It makes no mention of needing a specially encoded disc to produce P&S. So, I assumed they meant what they said, and showed. Often a mistake, I know... Maybe some day, I'll play around with it, and see what really comes out.

As to "anamorphic," we both know there are two meanings for that. One is the film process which uses special lenses to squeeze the WS image, so it fits on a standard 1.37:1 film frame. Then it uses a special lens to stretch it back out when projecting it. Being involved with film, I've known that for years.

Anamorphic for DVDs is different. Since this thread is in reference to a DVD, that's the meaning I took. The TV monitor must do the unsqueezing for anamorphic DVDs. The first explanation I ever read about this was from you, on this board. Later, I read up on it, at Digital Bits, and elsewhere. It is my understanding that to display an anamorphic DVD, you need a progressive scan player, and component, or DVI, etc, outputs, into a SD or HD digital TV, that can do the unsqueezing. I never had a pre-digital WS TV, but I have a familiarity with commercial analog TV projectors, designed to fill a screen in a university auditorium, and they have had no such unsqueezing capacity.

Further, with both my DVD players, when set to output to a 16:9 TV, the S-Vid output, and presumably the line output, still sends a 4:3 ratio picture, with a full, undistorted frame, with top and bottom bars, even with an anamorphic DVD. The picture must be zoomed to fill the screen, not stretched. I own over 500 LDs, always WS, when available, many from the Criterion Collection, and have never seen any labeled "anamorphic." What I have seen, but only for the last couple of years, are VHS tapes submitted to the film festival I work on, that I would have to call anamorphic, because they must be stretched to not be distorted, and to fill the screen. I've got a lot of commercial VHS tapes, and never seen any like that before. I hadn't heard of any TVs able to stretch the frame {i}before{/i} digital TVs. So, what you are saying about anamorphic LDs and DVDs is news to me.

Okay, I just spent some time checking Digital Bits, and some other info sites. You're right, apparently analog anamorphic has been common in Europe for years, but Digital Bits says that anamorphic is so allied with digital here, that they consider wide screen TV and digital TV to be interchangeable terms. Still, I never encountered anamorphic LDs in the ten years I collected them. Digital bits also said what you said about the "pan and scan" setting on DVD players. It would crop the sides, and that the disc had to be encoded for it, but none have ever been produced! That strikes me as damned strange! As to why my S-Vid outputs show a 4:3 aspect ratio, even when the disc is anamorphic, maybe that has something to do with the fact that the component cables are also hooked up, creating some kind of a default setting for the S-Vid. Both players said to only hook up one set, but I hooked up both, since I need the S-Vid signal sometimes, and the component when I'm not using the PIP, or needing to zoom, instead of stretch. Also, I can't use the component for the SVHS VCRs. Even though my receiver upgrades the signal, and outputs component from them, the picture sometimes goes black for a second or two when watching the component output. It warns of this in the manual. Isn't AV equipment fun!

For me, the meaning of "anamorphic widescreen" in the sense of Babylon 5 disks means: assuming NTSC, the video stream on disk is 720x480 (aspect ratio 1.5).

The container of the stream instructs DVD players "show this stream at 1.78". How particular players fulfill this recommendation, is up to them.

It sounds like in this case, the DVD player either failed not detecting the recommended aspect ratio, or chose some relatively funny way of following the recommendation.

To return to the original point of this thread...

I've had a few B5 moments lately. Last Wednesday I was taking the GRE, and in the essay section I almost cited JMS, but I couldn't come up with a brief, appropriate quote about how we always have a choice.

Then, today in class, I trotted out "truth is a three-edged sword," and the guy two seats to my left snorted and muttered, "Those pesky Vorlons..."

I got my latest package from Cafe Press yesterday, and decided that it would be fun to take my two new B5 mugs to work. (I keep a coffee maker at my desk and a couple of cups for myself and anyone I might feel moved to share with.) They are the "I'm in the middle of fifteen things, all of them annoying" and "If I survive this job without completely losing my mind" mugs.

When I arrived at work this morning I found out that some moron in another county had connected a vendor's laptop to our network and unleashed an old virus on the state-wide network. Unfortunatelya number of offices, including several of ours, turned out to have old Windows 2000 PCs that are only intemittently used and not up to date on patches still around, and all of them got infected. Among the internally generated updates they missed was the one changing the name of the server where our anti-virus clients get their virus pattern updates. As a result a worm that was discovered and neutralized last October, which exploited a security flaw in Windows that was patched, ditto, ended up hitting 11 of our PCs. Tallahassee dropped the hammer and remotely reset all our firewals to stop sending outbound traffic except in response to communication from two specific PCs up there. We were cut off from the internet, e-mail, several network programs. We could use a mini-computer programs running terminal emulation software. After the initial rush notifiying the offices and identifying and then collecting the affected computers (which have their hard drives wiped and be re-imaged to Windows XP - which all of them were scheduled to be in the next month anyway) things just ground to a halt. There were basically no service calls, I couldn't do much of anything since nearly all my programs - including our Help Desk database - are network or web-based. I was bored witless, going through a week's worth of newspapers and doing the crosswords, Jumbles and crypto-quotes. No office e-mail, no personal e-mail, no B5TV to check out at lunch or on my breaks. no CNN.com, nothing. No phone calls, no laptops to fix in between calls. I hated it.

But those mugs were sure appropriate. (I also should have recognized an omen when I saw one. When I arrived this morning there were our septic-tank pump-out trucks lined up in front of our building. Which is really strange, since we're on city sewers.. I suspect they had business with the Environmental Health & Engineering Division which is across the street from our building. )

Regards,

Joe