Playing Standard DVD Widescreen Version on Blu-Ray Player

n/t

I connected Blu-ray player to my TV using A/V Cable You know Yellow Video, Red & White Audio! Is that what you talking about??

You MUST use HDMI or componet (Red, Blue & Green cable) to get HD.

You need to save for a new tv really if you want HD, 19" is small even for a PC monitor. You can get a nice tv for well under $1500. $1k will even get you something way better then what you have now. You can get a 50" 1080p plamsa for like $900 now, I saw an add on TV for Sears $549 ($300 off a $800 tv) for a 42" panasonic plasma (? on the model #) for fathers day sale.

...via his new BD player. He's only looking to get the correct aspect ratio from what I read anyway.

cheers,
P

Greenbean66,

If you are using the yellow RCA video cable, then your BR player is defaulting to output a 4:3 signal, not 16:9. Since you are watching SD DVDs, you would not see true HD, but if you had a proper TV, the BR player would upscale your DVD picture to whatever the maximum resolution a new HD TV could handle. Since your TV does not have Component connectors (Component connection uses 3 RCA-type cables for video, which are Red, Green and Blue and audio is by separate cables.), you are only seeing the resolution of your TV, which may only be 480 lines of resolution. On your BR player you have Picture Format choices, one of which is 4:3 Normal. When using this and while trying to watch a Widescreen 16:9 DVD, you will get an image that has large black bars on the top and bottom with an image across the middle of the screen like a band aid. If your BR setting is to default 16:9, then the image you get on your 4:3 will be squished vertically (people will look tall), but you won't have black bars. Unfortunately, your BR player is technologically way more advanced than your TV, so to really see Widescreen DVDs in their full glory, you will need to buy an HDTV which will have a 16:9 screen, which is what the other poster suggested.

Hi Dan- I have an older (secondary) "HT" setup in my den. It's a Sony DVD carousel player connected to a 27" Sony Triniton (w/ older Onkyo & Bose surrounds). It's really basic, like everything used to be before the wave of gizmos hit all our homes . Anyway, the DVD -> TV connection has only gone as far as being upgraded to S-Video from the original (yellow) composite. The only settings we had to mess with were on the Sony DVD player in order to see the OAR on the SD shaped Sony TV screen. How would the OP's situation be any different, since the BD player, albeit lower end, still supports SD content via DVDs? FWIW, there was nothing we had to change on the Sony TV to accommodate the anamorphic widescreen content.

cheers,
Pedro

That would be true only for playing blue ray discs. SD DVDs played back with that same player could still come through to his SD TV in the correct aspect ratio, even from a blu ray. There's plenty of bandwidth via the old cables for SD .

-P