Ask Lemmy

I knew a family growing up who'd check out movies from the library instead of Blockbuster usually, and as DVDs became more relevant they kept going for VHS tapes because they were less likely to be scratched to unreadability. I can't remember how much my family went for VHS tapes vs DVDs but it may have been purely based on availability. I do however remember my dad had a strong preference for widescreen despite our setup letterboxing widescreen films (like most home theaters of the day) and quite a few times being sent back to swap the full screen release I grabbed for the wide screen one

For any young'uns reading, in the early 2000s with broadcasters shifting from transmitting a 4:3 image to a 16:9 image, home media soon followed but since many people didn't yet have hardware supporting widescreen, fullscreen releases typically had the edges chopped off to fit in a 4:3 aspect ratio while widescreen saw less cropping compared to the version seen in theatres, but then for older home theatre hardware that only knows 4:3 video formats it would have black bars on the top and bottom whereas fullscreen would of course fill a 4:3 screen