Portable Players and Letterbox Support

Hi. I have had some bad luck with portable players where letterbox movies are not correctly supported ("There's Something About Mary", "The Great Escape", "enemey of the State", etc.) It seems like there are no players (or very few and expensive ones) that correctly support letterbox movies, which annoyes me. I need some information on whether or not this is an industry standard, or the names of players that do properly support letterbox for me to check out. Any information at all would help. Thanks!

What, exactly, is happening when you try to play a widescreen movie like the ones you mention on your portable player? You only say it doesn't correctly "support" them. Give us more information about what's going wrong.

John

Specifically, when I try to play a letterbox formatted movie in a lot of players (specifically Shinco/Initial, which is in front of me right now to check), I have two choices. One, it tries to stretch the picture into an anamorphic style, so I get black bars top and bottom and the whole picture is stretched side to side, or try 4:3 mode, where I get correct aspect ratio, but there are black bars on all four sides, so I'm only using about 1/3 of the total screen area. These are players with 16:9 screens, so a letterbox movie should fill the whole screen with no bordering.

EDIT: Anamorphic wide movies play correctly; 2.35:1 movies get correctly sized top and bottom black bars, and 16:9 anamorphic letterbox fills the screen. Movies that are non-anamorphic 16:9 letterbox are not playing correctly. Hope this helps.

Mu,

Not necessarily. 16:9 screens have an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. Movies with ratios wider than 1.78:1 will still have black bars at the top and bottom. Both "The Great Escape" and "Enemy of the State" have ratios greater than 1.78:1.

Part of your problem is determining whether or not a movie has anamorphic enhancement. With non-enhanced video, you have to determine if you want to watch it in 4:3 or zoom mode. The stretch mode distorts the picture, so I never use it with portable DVD players or with 16:9 TVs.

Eddie

Both "Enemy of the State" and "The Great Escape" (the orignal DVD release, not the collector's edition) are non-anamorphic so you'll need to use the zoom feature, as posters5 mentioned, to have them fill the screen. Of course when you zoom in, you lose a considerable amount of resolution which is the problem with non-anamorphic DVD when viewed on any widescreen monitor, be it a 7" portable DVD player or a 60" rear-projection TV. (I own both and can't stand non-anamorphic DVDs!) I also second posters5's recommendation to not use that stretch feature.

Re: Letterbox Support and also Review of Shinco SDP-6820 8.5" portable player

Mu, i am having the same problem as you with my 8.5" Shinco and a letterboxed "Lost" DVD i have. In 4:3 mode i have the black bars top and bottom and as you say it is only using 1/3 screen as the side bits of LCD panel are not being used either. In 16:9 "wide" mode, it just stretches the 4:3 picture out to fill the wide panel, but this still leaves the black borders top and bottom and now the original 4:3 aspect picture is distorted.
The zoom feature mentioned deosn't do what we want at all, in 4:3 mode it chops off left and right as it zooms so you lose all the widescreen information (why can't the 4:3 zoom mode use the extra area left and right in widescreen LCD panel!!!)
The Shinco seems to make a terrible job of letterbox - it is advertised as having 4:3, 4:3 Letterbox and 16:9 modes (in all the tech specs on sales sites such as Firebox) but in reality it does not have proper 4:3 Letterbox support.
For proper 4:3 Letterbox support it should be possible to go into 16:9 wide mode and then have a *vertical only* stretch to remove the black bars and put aspect ratio back to correct 4:3 aspect.
Also in 4:3 mode when you zoom, it should expand into the 16:9 area and not be stuck in the 4:3 area only - hardware could be a lot better done than it is.
Also i don't know if everyone has this problem but on my Shinco 8.5" SDP-6820, in 4:3 mode there is a noticable bright vertical bar about 0.5" on left of 4:3 picture which slighly overlaps left edge - noticable in low light and distracting - not at all acceptable really.
p.s. also very disappointed with the JPEG support in this shinco portable player, it is ultra slow displaying each picture and very poor quality rendering of any of the Canon EOS 1D MkII JPEG images i tried.
:(

By the way, I want to clarify something. Zoom mode and stretch mode are different things. When you're watching non-anamorphic widescreen video, you can use the zoom feature without distorting the image. However, when you use the stretch mode, then the movie will appear to be too wide, and everything will look "fat".

The stretch mode also distorts images when you stretch a 4:3 program on a 16:9 monitor. The best thing is to avoid the stretch mode altogether and to use the zoom mode for non-anamorphic programs when using a 16:9 monitor.