Widescreen TVs

One thing I've always liked about DVDs is that they are, for the most part, available in widescreen format, which was rather intermittent on VHS tapes. Only in special cases would it be made available.

I like the idea of a widescreen television, since it makes it possible to watch widescreen format, without the black bars drawing attention to themselves.

Twentieth Century Fox, however, seems to be a bit behind when it comes to adapting to this new technology. All of their widescreen DVDs and VHS tapes have one thing in common. If the film in question has subtitles, the video release removes them from the frame, and places them below it, in the black bar area. (This is true not only of Star Wars, but other films as well, such as The Last of the Mohicans.) If the captions only take up one line, this may not be a problem. For many Star Wars captions, however, they take up two lines. I've seen AOTC on one widescreen TV, and the subtitles were completely cut off. Does anyone who has a widescreen tv know which models don't cut off the subtitles? If not, I'd say FOX needs te reprogram their DVDs so that this feature is visible.

 

Personally, I like certain films not to have the subtitles on. Elvish, for instance, sounds far more beautiful if you *listen* to it, and not read along. Huttese isn't quite as nice

But let's face it, haven't we seen the films so often that we already know what is being said?

 

edit: redundant, sorry. Didn't read your post properly Ewan. [/dumb]

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe if your DVD player and your widescreen TV are set for animorphic output & input, the subtitles should be where you can see them. (This is not factoring in overscan, of course.)

 

#1: Not that I hav a widescreen tv set yet, but how do I do that?
#2: What is overscan?
#3: (While we're n the subject) What does "enhanced" for 16x9 televisions mean? Is the visual field expanded to take up the whole screen, or are the black bars set in deeper, cutting off part of the picture that would otherwise be visible?

 

Anamorphic enhancement is a way to increase resolution by stretching the 16:9 picture over a 4:3 frame. And, you will still see black bars with a widescreen tv when watching 2.35:1 material (although they will be smaller). You will also see black bars while watching 4:3 material (unless using some fake widescreen technique).

It sounds to me that you're using 4:3 letterbox with zoom mode on tv, set your dvd player to 16:9 mode, and you should be good to go.

 

Here's a good read on anamorphic widescreen and here's a page on overscan.

 

Subtitles come in nice and clear on my widescreen plasma TV.

The person's TV you were watching must've had their settings wrong.

I've never had a problem with it.

 

The setting was wrong on the DVD player. You need to go into the menu and select which type of TV you have. That should fix the problem. If you can't do that with your DVD player. You need to go buy a new one.

 

I have a wide screen TV.I use closed caption the letters show up.It's 36 inch though.

 

Actually I think the REAL problem is that they are allowing the player to render the subtitles instead of leaving it "burned in" on the film like it would be theatrically.

I can understand WHY they do it (this way they can support multiple language tracks for audio as well as subtitles, if the subs were burned in to the film it's one release per language). But most players use very poor font rendering and it looks like crap. And, as you noticed, the player puts the text somewhat wherever it wants to. In your case, at the bottom of the screen which is in the black bar area.