Many DVD players have the capability of playing DVDs at a native 16:9 aspect ratio. I believe that the support for this lies in the DVD in addition to the DVD player. The benefit of this being that if you're watching a movie in widescreen, the anamorphic mode allows you to have more horizontal lines of resolution actually being used on the TV for the picture. If you were to view this anamorphic mode on a ``normal'' TV, it'd appear squished left-to-right, so that everyone would appear to be very tall and thin. I say that so that those of you that aren't able to view this mode won't get totally confused by the question I'm about to ask.

This is probably also specific to NTSC, but if anyone in PAL- or SECAM-land wants to add anything, I'd be happy to hear it.

So, for those of you that have 16:9-capable TVs:

Have you noticed that some DVDs are apparently not encoded correctly, so that, even though movies that should still be (slightly) letterboxed on the 16:9 TV aren't, so that you still get (slightly) tall-and-thin people? I've noticed this on a few DVDs I've rented recently, and, initially, I thought that my TV might need to be tweaked a little for size, but then I'll play other movies and they look fine. And it's all definitely in 16:9 mode, because I can tell both when the TV switches from 4:3 to 16:9 and I can tell the difference between the scanned vs. non-scanned black.

(It's interesting to note that most movies are still slightly letterboxed on 16:9 TVs, as, apparently, one of the deciding factors for choosing 16:9 (about 1.77:1) was that it was somewhere inbetween the NTSC aspect ratio (4:3, or about 1.33:1) and the narrowest commonest movie ratio (1.85:1), thus allowing current TV to not be ``too'' inverse-letterboxed, nor movies ``too'' letterboxed.)

Does anyone have any idea if this might be a problem with my DVDs, my DVD player, my TV, or any, or all, of the above?