The topic of matted widescreen DVD versus anamorphic widescreen DVD can be confusing.
Many people assume that all widescreen transfers from film to DVD video are the same.
This article gives a brief history of the anamorphic film process along with the film matting process, and shows how similar techniques are used to produce two different kinds of DVDs. Not only are the resulting DVDs different, one technique produces a visually superior DVD than the other. The aspect ratio is simply the ratio of width of a screen to its height. This means that the width of the screen is 1.33 times longer than its height. The larger the ratio, the wider the screen.