Doesn't your TV have a zoom option which displays such films correctly? There really should be one. Have you tried the various aspect ratios available on your screen? What brand and model do you have?

Oh, and just to make sure: did you change your blu-ray player's settings to output the correct signal for your screen? All too often, the default settings do not give the correct result.

In general, from what I see, most profiles contain the correct information on anamorphic vs. non-anamorphic (the anamorphic box needs to be ticked when editing the profile, so it's not an automatic thing that it's set tot anamorphic). In recent years, very few non-anamorphic discs are being released. Of course, your mileage may vary...

Quoting dee1959jay:

Quote:
Doesn't your TV have a zoom option which displays such films correctly? There really should be one. Have you tried the various aspect ratios available on your screen? What brand and model do you have?

I've played around with the Zoom on my TV, AVR and Player, and it usually looks pretty bad.  Luckily I don't have that many non-anamorphic titles as once I started collecting I'd try to avoid them unless it was really something I wanted as I assumed most would get re-released at some point.

I just did the filter that I suggested above, and found a good deal of DVDs that say they are non-anamorphic, but are newer, so I doubt they actually aren't.  Another thing I'll have to add to my to do list.

Figured there was a way to filter for it! 

I've got 80 on my list, but figure at least twenty of those are in fact anamorphic.

20 might be pushing it, but the following are releases within the past 5 years that I doubt are non-anamorphic:
Fly Me To The Moon
An American Affair
Lymelife
Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
My One and Only
The Freebie
Drive Angry
Win Win
The Perfect Host
Once
School For Scoundrels
the Return

I've watched Once just a bit ago and am pretty sure it is Anamorphic.  I'ma lso looking at an export from a few weeks ago.  I'll check these out tonight.

Thanks for all your replies. To answer some of the doubters out there, the TV is a Sony KDL-40EX503 and the BD player is a Sony BDP-S350. The TV has various zoom options, but if the signal is coming in via the HDMI input then stretching a non-anamorphic disk to the correct format is not one of them. The only way I can do it is to put the disk in the DVD recorder and use SCART instead of HDMI. This is a bit of a palaver to go through whenever I want to view one of these disks. I guess Sony assume that any signal coming in via HDMI will be correctly formatted.

As for the filtering, I was doing exactly what Mitchi suggested and getting an awful lot of films listed that I know are anamorphic. I have 650 DVDs (excluding Blu-Ray disks) in my collection, of which 521 are marked as wide screen and 47 are not flagged as anamorphic. Looking through these there are many which I know are anamorphic: to select a few from the start of the list we have Blade Trinity, Bones Series 6, Despicable Me, Good Will Hunting, Harry Potter + the Deathly Hallows Part 1, Ice Age 2 & 3, Kung Fu Panda ... the list goes on.

Some of them are because they are the 'box' for a collection: eg. The Lord of the Rings extended edition is marked this way, but none of the disks in the collection are listed. In this case I feel the overall collection should also be marked as anamorphic, though I haven't checked what the policy is on this. The complete Poirot also appears with none of the disks, but in this case it's less clear how to mark it correctly since the early episodes were made in 4:3 while the later ones are anamorphic widescreen.

I guess I will just have to be a good citizen and go through them all ensuring they are correctly flagged and then updated the profiles.

John

Quoting pauls42:

Quote:
I think you need to download all the children profiles for a start since all the individual profiles will have the information correctly set.

Yes, I have all the child profiles. The point I was trying to make here is that when all the children are marked as anamorphic widescreen, as with LOTR, it seems illogical that the parent isn't. This isn't really a problem because it's clear that it's the parent, it just upsets my sense of orderliness.

Thanks for your suggestion on the BD player. I've looked through the instructions again and can see a setting that may have a bearing on the display format, though it isn't obvious. I'll give it a go when I get home.

John

Ok, had a play with the controls yesterday and set the screen format to original. I guess it's an improvement, but it means that 4:3 programs no longer fill the screen unless I zoom in. It's a bit frustrating that the situation is actually slightly worse than with my old CRT TV, which just used to cope with every format thrown at it.

Anyway, thanks for the help.

John