I own a Toshiba 7990 dvd player (hooked up to my regular 25" Toshiba tv via component) and it plays regular dvds great, but for XviD playback it seems to be stretching the image vertically a bit. This is most noticeable with widescreen files (like widescreen TV shows). It's still letterboxed a little, but not as much, and you can tell everything is stretched a bit...
Now, I don't know if this has something to do with playback of XviD compared to DivX files. The manual says it only plays DivX. I know most of my files are Xvid. But that would be weird if that were the case.
I'm wondering if anyone else has had this same issue? I'm thinking maybe the player itself is defective... But I'm hesitant to send it back (as I've had issues with doing this prior to this).
Any help is appreciated -- thanks!
Check the DVD player setup and make sure you've told it you have a 4:3 display. If it's set to 16:9, anamorphic widescreen titles will be vertically "squished".
If you're set there, it could be how your DiVX and XviD files were encoded... and I'm not sure there's much you can do about it besides re-encode them for a 4:3 display. Digital PC video formats have a long way to go before they always play nice with home theater gear.