Xbox 360, widescreen DVDs, and me

anjinfob

So my roommates and I all got together, and we're now the proud owners of an Xbox 360, HD-DVD drive, and a nice Sharp Aquos HDTV. The 360, gaming-wise and HD-DVD wise, is gorgeous. Fantastic clarity through the provided component cables, normal widescreen resolutions, etc.

The problem lies when we put in normal widescreen DVDs (into either the 360 or the HD drive). The TV is telling us that it's switching to 480p (which is fine), but then it squishes the picture into what seems to be a 4x3 box? Is there a way to get the 360 to display them in widescreen (without upscaling - don't want to spring for that VGA cable just yet)/are we retarded? I can't imagine that Microsoft would have a "DVD player" that could not display widescreen DVDs correctly, so I feel like this is definitely our problem. We've troubleshooted (troubleshot?) it extensively, so I guess I'm just posting this on the off chance that someone could recognize a problem that idiots such as us are having.

Thanks!

EDIT: I guess I should mention, we can set the TV to "Stretch" or whatever, and it fills the screen, but as the name says, it's not true widescreen.

TM2 Rampage

Go to the options for the 360... it's located in the rightmost "wing" thingie, I believe.

Under "Console" or something there's some option for "Display" where you can switch it to widescreen and various resolutions (y'know, switch it to the resolution of your HDTV. Hope you have the right cable [component, I believe]) and whatnot.


EDIT: Oooooh. Woops. Looks like you've got it set up correctly... it's just that widescreen DVDs aren't displayed correctly, eh. Are there any options in the onscreen DVD toolbar that the 360 has?

anjinfob

Yeah, we have 480p set to widescreen on that - I think the problem is that the TV itself doesn't like 480p widescreen, and so even when it's getting a 480p widescreen signal, it squishes it into the 4x3 box that it's so comfortable with. In that case, the Stretch setting actually makes it right, surprisingly enough. So in conclusion, yes, both my roommates and I are retarded. Thanks for the help though

harvest

480p isn't a widescreen resolution, which is why you have to stretch it on your TV to make it look normal.