A
DVD that has been
enhanced for
widescreen is referred to as being
anamorphic. Different from normal widescreen presentation, an anamorphic
transfer actually
compresses the picture, so
pixels that would made taken up the whole
vertical portion of the screen instead only take up part of it. This makes little difference to viewing the movie on an
ordinary low-definition television set, but on a
computer monitor or
high-definition TV, it can provide substantially better vertical
resolution than a non-anamorphic DVD will.
More and more studios are beginning to release their DVDs in anamorphic format, largely because videophiles get annoyed with them when they do not.
(This term is not to be confused with anthropomorphic, which sounds similar but means something entirely different. :)