Mac only - I spent part of this week working on transferring some family videos to DVD. I have a pre-professional grade HD video camera that obviously shoots in widescreen. After working on it and sending it to iDVD for a quick menu and then burning it, I noticed that the widescreen video doesn’t get letterboxed on standard (4:3) TVs as I expected. Rather, the video gets cropped (much to my disappointment).

Luckily I came across myDVDEdit, a tool which lets you modify the contents of an unprotected DVD image on your computer. By following these directions I was able to get myDVDEdit to force my DVD player to letterbox my widescreen videos on standard TVs. It’s too bad iDVD doesn’t have this ability built in, but this is a nice work around.