Dangerous Lives of Alter Boys Letterbox Problem

[2Divine]

So I just went out and bought The Dangerous Lives of Alter Boys on DVD, because I think it's a great film. I take it to my friend's house and we watch it on his TV. Everything's good.
I take it home and try to watch it, and it comes up fullscreen on my TV. Try as I might, I can't revert the thing to letterbox format. I swear I pressed every button on my DVD player. Nothing. This is sort of a big deal to me because I prefer watching movies in their original format.
Being the anal-retentive ex-film students that we are, my friend and I went and rented another copy of DLoAB from Blockbuster. Again, it worked fine on his TV/DVD player, but on mine it would only come up fullscreen. This is killing me!
Does anybody have an idea why it's doing this? I assume it has something to do with the interaction between the disc and my player, but why? And is there any way to fix it? Thanks in advance for any help you all may be able to offfer...

[Mynd Hed]

The short answer is that some DVD players will allow you to zoom into the center of the picture on widescreen DVDs, giving you a faux pan-and-scam effect, and you probably have that option selected by mistake. There should be an option somewhere in your DVD menu (not the menu to the DVD disc, but the setup menu to your DVD player) that asks for the aspect ratio. Make sure to select the letterbox format, which will probably appear as 4:3LB or 16:9LB. However, without actually seeing your DVD player and fooling around with it myself, I can't get any more detailed than that. If you post the make and model of your DVD player, maybe you'll get lucky and someone on the forums will have the same one and they could give you more detailed advice.

Oh, and props for knowing that widescreen is absolutely, finally, and forever superior to pan and scam.