I’ve mentioned before that I don’t really like renting movies; DVD’s are pretty cheap these days so I usually just end up buying whatever I want to watch.  One of the gifts I received this year was a gift card to Blockbuster (a thoughtful gift as I’m a movie buff)…so recently I went to the local store to spend it.  Every single goddamn title I wanted to buy was offered in one format only:  Widescreen.  Ok, so I’ll rent this go round.  Nope, all of those were in widescreen as well.  Bye bye Blockbuster.

Before I purchased my hi-def TV, this wouldn’t have been a problem as Sony DVD players (and probably others) have a setting where you can kind of “stretch” the image vertically if it’s widescreen format to make better utilization of the screen real-estate…it looks a little weird, but is better than having 5+ inches of black space above and below the image IMO.  When I moved to hi-def (and component cable hookups), this is no longer an option, so the widescreen format (although beautiful at 480p or 720i) looks like crap on my 36” 4:3 ratio set.  I paid for the full 36”, and by golly I’d like to put it all of those pixels to good use.

My point is this:  What happened to the dual side DVD format?  When I purchased my first DVD player (‘99 if memory serves), some DVD’s came with both formats on the same disc; one side was standard format, and the other side was widescreen.  I don’t know when they stopped manufacturing discs like this, but I haven’t seen one in quite a while.  It really was a no brainer though and I can’t figure out why they would move away from this.  Perhaps manufacturing costs were too high (though I’d be willing to pay extra to have both formats because at some point in the future I will no doubt purchase a widescreen TV and it’d be great not to have to go out and re-purchase all my DVD’s)?  Who knows, but the other gripe here is why is it so hard to find DVD’s in the standard aspect ratio?  I did notice that Amazon usually sells DVD’s in both formats, so kudos to them…but I still miss my dual sided DVD’s.  I don’t think Blockbuster will be getting much business from me in the future.