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Originally Posted by freakaftr8
the up side is a very digital like picture with the line compression. The down side of course is convergence. The bottom R/G horiz convergence throws off a bit. But a slight tweak and it's good to go. I may consider a switch and resistor for that too.
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Shawn-
I don't think there is a "new DVD format". Rather, your player may have got set to 16:9 mode by mistake. (If your player has some kind of "full screen" setting, that could be another cause entirely.) The three typical settings on DVD players are: "4:3 letterbox", "4:3 pan and scan" and "16:9". 4:3 letterbox manually adds black bars on the top and bottom of widescreen movies (unless the disc itself has the black bars encoded, mostly older DVDs). 4:3 pan and scan chooses the pan-and-scan version of a movie if both versions are on one side of a disc; it does NOT manually make a wide-screen movie fill the screen (again, unless it is one of the few odd players specially made to do that). In either of these modes, a true 4:3 DVD (such as one with a TV show, or one of the awful modified "full-screen" movie versions) will fill the 4:3 standard TV screen with video. 16:9 mode is usually for component-mode inputs on HD-capable wide screen TVs, but it also works on the composite output (and there have been a number of wide-screen (16:9) non-HD TVs made, especially in Europe). If you choose 16: 9 and feed an RF modulator, you will get exactly what you describe, a movie with tall, thin characters (or stretched-out ones, it is the same effect).
In the pre-HD but early-DVD days, there were mods described to do exactly what you have done with your Zenith, and for precisely the reason you describe: Using all of the scan lines of the TV on the 16:9 area to get a higher resolution than the 4:3 letterbox setting allowed. Often, the mod included a switch controlling a relay (or relays) that had enough poles/switch contacts to change all the needed circuits, such as three vertical circuits in a three-CRT projection TV. I almost did this with my 61" Sony set in the year 2000.
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Considering all I do with this set is watch DVDs I find I'm never switching it back.
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Roundie color TVs and older rectangular sets are ideal for watching letterboxed content, as you have found out.