With respect to DVD formats, what is anamorphic widescreen and how does it differ from letterbox?
Anamorphic from two Greek words, means literally “capable of up-shape”. To grasp the need for this you have to know that films for theatre showing use a “wide-screen” format that is not completely compatible with traditional television displays, although the newer wide screen televisions go some way to get round this. A traditional TV has an aspect ratio (width compared with height) of 4 by 3 (1.333:1) whereas a wide screen TV has an aspect ratio of 16 by 9 (1.78:1) and there are a few steps in between that we needn’t get into here. The film can be put onto the DVD as a 16 by 9 image with black bits at the top and bottom included on the image to make it fit the 4 by 3 TV screen. This is so called letterbox. It would look exactly the same on any display. If the film were encoded with the full 16 by 9 information and the playback displayed everything on a 4 by 3 aspect ratio the picture would fill the screen, but it would be impossibly squeezed in the left-right plane. Now if it were pos
