Home audio & video forum: letter box with blue ray

You don't give enough information to describe the letterbox problem. If by letterbox, you mean that you might still have some black bars on the top and bottom of your screen, but the image fills your TV screen left-right, this may be normal. You need to understand that your 16:9 TV matches HD video perfectly, but when it comes to theatrical films, unfortunately films were shot in a variety of aspect ratios that just don't perfectly match your TV's aspect ratio. For example, there are films that were shot using aspect ratios of 1.85:1, 2.35:1, 2.40:1 and many others. These aspect ratios don't perfectly match the aspect ratio of your TV, so you will still see some bars on the top and bottom of your display when watching movies shot in these formats. This applies to both Blu-Ray and standard-def movies. If you just can't put up with the black bars caused by these formatted movies, you can simply use your TV's remote control and use the Zoom button to expand your TV's display. This will get rid of the black bars but the trade-off is that you've expanded the TV image causing a slight softness.

If by chance, your black bars are seen both on the top-bottom AND left-right, then you don't have the settings on either your DVD player or TV set correctly, and you need to read the manual on each to learn how to setup each for widescreen movies.

It has to do with the aspect ratio of the streamed version vs the BD version. BD version will usually most closely mimic what you would see in the theaters. Even some streaming versions though are formatted for home viewing. There's no way to know 100% what you are noticing unless you provide all the pertinent details such as :

-SKU# of the Blu Ray title in question

-Link to the same Amazon onDemand title/version in question

-Information on your HDTV & BD player (make/model/settings)

Are you absolutely certain that you selected the correct version @ Amazon? IMO it would help if you do more reading on the aspect ratio subject in general to help you get a handle on it. Unfortunately, most of what's out there doesn't deal with streaming since it's relatively new. There's some good stuff here though:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspect_ratio_(image)

*the external links at the end are quite useful

http://www.widescreen.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamorphic_widescreen

Also keep in mind some of *like* those bars, as long as what we are seeing is close to what's in the theaters .