V-Compression

Our TV has a fancy mode called v-compression that takes the resolution of the a 4:3 aspect ratio screen and crunches it into the 16:9 letterbox part of the screen. The effect of this is that you get a higher resolution (33%) when you watch widescreen DVDs. While this is a neat feature I didn't figure out how to take advantage of it till recently. The TV manual is no help. The problem was that is that it would take a widescreen movie and simply crunch it smaller. Turns out you need to lie to your DVD player and set it up to think it is outputting to a 16:9 TV. Then the image on the 4:3 screen will be extended vertically, at which point you turn on the wonderful v-compression, and everything ends up where it should be, inside a nice letterbox, with higher resolution.