Oh man, are you sure you really want that? If you stretch your screen to do that, then you are actually distorting what the director actually made. They don’t encode the black bands just to be jerks, they do it because most movies simply aren’t shot in 16:9.
Notice in theaters that the previews play and the screen looks sorta like what you’d expect from a widescreen TV. Then when the feature starts, a lot of the time the curtains open up even more. That’s because they are going from 16:9 to 2.35:1.
That’s not mathematical randomness. The current “widescreen” movie format is the equivalent of taking similar anamorphic optics (i.e. the lenses that are used to make a standard 4:3 35mm film print project into a 16:9 viewport) and using them again to take the 16:9 to 2.35:1 (something like 4/3 * 16/9 = 2.37ish).
The reason they do this is because the movie industry always has to stay somehow “different” than home TV so that you have a reason to go watch stuff in their venues.
Up until the late 50’s, movies were 4:3, just like our standard TV sets. In fact a lot of the movies from the 50s and early 60s are available now on DVD where the “widescreen” version is actually a version of the real movie (as it was made by the director and seen in the theaters) with extra cropping added (removing actual movie content) just so that they make it fit in a 16:9 viewport because people who don’t know better think that’s desirable.
Then once TVs took off, hollywood was in a bind. They had to work to stay ahead of the curve in order not to be obviated. They had color before most people had color TV, but it was clear where that was going. They tried smell-o-vision, but that was stupid. Then they hit on the widescreen format as a solution to keep the mystique of the theater alive. A rectangular aspect ratio does mimic more closely the real human perception, and in the early days of color TV, sets were small enough that there was no way that folks would suffer gladly any sacrifice of screen real estate just to match a weird aspect ratio. Plus, if you were going to make a CRT into a rectangular viewport it necessarily meant that you were wasting otherwise usable space.
The people who experimented with different widescreen formats produced a variety of results. Some classics like “The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly” were shot in Cinemascope, which was about 2.7:1 (the Mexican Standoff at the climax of that film is thought of by many as the perfect usage of the format).
When they had to settle on a DVD format, they chose to go with DVDs in normal mode, with 4:3 aspect ratio, and an anamorphic widescreen mode with aspect ratio of 16:9 (1.78:1) as a good compromise.
But since hollywood still tries to make films that get you into the theater for a special experience instead of waiting for it to come out on DVD, they mostly film the good stuff wider. It’s just the way it is.
And the way you get to see those films on your computer screen or home entertainment center is to put up with some extra black bands in there making sure that the presentation isn’t stretched or otherwise distorted.
In my opinion, instead of getting mad at the pixels of display not being used for the movie, you should be mad as hell that they are actually encoding (and therefore wasting bits) on blank parts of the screen!
I’ve really enjoyed your posts. I’d add one other economic reason for wide screen. Wide screen movies are more economically feasible for theaters. You can fit more seats across, and don’t have to make the theater as tall.
That IS what I get exercised about...
My preference is to watch the movie as the Director intended... not pan and scan. So for those oldies, I have no problem with 4:3...
then, of course, there's Cinerama...2.89:1