Just wondering if any of the DVDO's do auto pillar-boxing. You know when you are watching trailers, featurette's or other material that has an odd mix of 4:3 and 16:9? Instead of seeing stretched 4:3 material, it gets pillar-boxed when it's interspersed between 16:9 material. I have a Panasonic F85 dvd player and it will auto pillar-box stuff and it's a nice feature. Do any of the DVDO's do this?

I believe your DVD player has access to flags that tell it what aspect ratio to use, and then it adds black bars as necessary depending on the source material AR and what you've told it is your display's AR.

The problem is that, for non-HD resolutions, that flag does not exist within the actual video signal sent out over the wire. (For HD resolutions, it's simple: always 16:9.) An external VP, with access only to the video signal and not the extra flags on the actual DVD, can't know whether the pixels it's receiving are supposed to be the same AR as your display or whether it needs to add black borders (or stretch, if that's your preference). Put another way, 480i and 480p video signals are sometimes anamorphic, sometimes not, and there's no flag to indicate which.

Somebody please correct me if I'm wrong here.

sidb hit the nail on the head. This has been talked about in the Lumagens forums, but I think people just gloss over the problem of anamorphic vs non-anamorphic when trying to determine what AR an image is. It sounds easy at first, but there are insoluble problems for full automation here, you need some manual intervention.

If you have sources that always put out widescreen and sources that always put out 4:3, you can set them to different inputs on your VP and configure each input separately. If you are using a DVD player, it can pillarbox 4:3 material for you before it's sent out (although that effectively decreases the horizontal resolution of the active part of the frame as opposed to letting your VP or HD display do it). I find that game consoles are just terrible, though. Each different game may or may not be widescreen (and may have a different amount of underscan) -- you just have to keep your VP's remote control handy.

Yeah, it's not ultra essential. It was just a nice feature. You know when the trailers on the dvd are a mix of anamorphic and non-anamorphic and/or when the featurette is a mix of 16:9 and 4:3. The Panasonic F85 can be set to auto-matically pillarbox when appropriate. It looks nice because things are in their proper aspect ratio. It's only trailers and/or featurette parts, so it's not bad that they aren't anamorphic or 16:9, but at least the aspect ratio looks right. Not a big deal if I can't do it with the iScan.