What is an anamorphic DVD?
Anamorphic DVD relates widescreen movies. Normally when a widescreen movie is transferred to video, the black bars that appear at the top and bottom of the picture are encoded together with the movie. With an anamorphic transfer, though, the picture is squeezed to fit the standard 4:3 frame, then unsqueezed by the DVD player. This means a better picture, because no lines of resolution are wasted on the black bars, because the player itself generates the black bars. As an added bonus for those with 16:9 TVs, the TV stretches the image to fill the screen, doing away with the black bars altogether.
When a widescreen movie is transferred to home video, the black bars at the top and bottom of the picture are usually encoded along with the movie. But when a film is anamorphically transferred, the picture is squeezed to fit into a 4:3 frame, then unsqueezed by your DVD player. This way, instead of lines of resolution being used on the letterbox area during the encoding process, the unsqueezed picture uses the full resolution of the entire screen because the player generates the black bars. If you’re fortunate enough to have a 16:9 TV, the TV will stretch out the picture to fill your screen so there are no bars. However, if you tell your DVD player that you have a 4:3 TV, the DVD player will format the picture for letterbox display on your screen.
