Netflix makes unwanted cuts to my favorite films

I am still on the Netflix DVD plan and not the streaming plan. Why? Because I love movies. I believe pan-and-scan (the cropping of rectangular movies to fit a square TV screen) is an abomination visited upon great films by hacks.

Netflix doesn't pan-and-scan, but they do just zoom in to fit their whims, leaving the intended image cropped, sometimes to the sacrifice of the scene. I want the director's vision, not the codec's.

Do you know how badly Netflix reformats movies to fit TV and computer screens? It turns out, they hack up your movies quite a bit when they format a movie for streaming. It's a bit past "cropping" and into "offensively altering" for me. There's even a Tumblr devoted to before and after effects of what Netflix does to your movies.

This is particualrly terrible for films with subtitles, as on the widescreen videos, the subtitles are often placed in the black bar below the picture both for legibility and not to interfere with the visual. Users report that in non-foeign movies, like the Star Trek films, all the alien dialog is missing because Netflix crops out the subtitles. This also applies to some movies with non-english scenes or dialog, like most Bond films or international thrillers.