Question about viewing original aspect ratio

[chip75]

Originally Posted by grey77

there is a small group i came across who prefered the squashed image but it's on the p2p scene. according to them the black bars perserve the original aspect ratio of the film so they wont crop it out of blu-ray encodes.

Don't listen to them. If anybody's watching a film with the squashed-look then they're not watching it at the correct aspect ratio and they're distorting the image. If you're making your own encodes you don't need the black bars (it's just wasted data) as most players (software or hardware) will generate the black-bars when you playback the video. Take note of the trailer below:

Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy - Trailer 1 (OFFICIAL) - YouTube

It's in 2:40:1. YouTube's player adds the black bars, if you download it and play it back with VLC player its dimensions will be 1920x800. The black-bars are generated by the player, unlike:

X-Men: Days of Future Past | Official UK Trailer #2 HD | 2014 - YouTube

The black-bars are encoded into the video itself (it's 1920x1080). When both of these titles hit Blu-ray they'll have the black-bars as part of the image but they should be discarded when working out the aspect ratio.