Originally this post was supposed to be about how great Amazon Unbox on TiVo is. When I saw a new movie featured for only $.99 (rental), I snatched it up right away. The cost was right and within one click the movie was available on my TiVo by the time I’m ready to watch it. I figured this would be a great supplement to my Blockbuster Total Access account moving forward. Honestly, everything was as smooth as promised, right up until I actually watched it. Before I get into it, let me paste this little clip from Amazon’s website from their “FAQ for Unbox”:

How does the quality of Unbox videos compare to the quality of shows recorded by my TiVo DVR?
Unbox videos watched on a TiVo DVR are of equal or better quality than videos recorded at the Best Quality setting on a TiVo Series2 DVR.

So, it’s “equal to or better than the BEST quality setting on my TiVo”? This is an outright LIE. I am using a TiVo Series 3 HD Recorder on a widescreen TV. The movie I downloaded was NOT anamorphic. This means that if you watch it on a widescreen TV, it will have black borders on both the sides AND top and bottom of the screen. No combination of zoom modes from the TiVo or my TV would result in a picture that wasn’t stretched, cropped or degraded significantly. I ended up watching the movie in this “windowed” mode, feeling like it’s 2003 all over again. But it’s not, it’s 2007 and Amazon and TiVo need to get this fixed IMMEDIATELY. 2 years ago I went through my DVD collection and sold off ALL my non-anamorphic titles. People don’t have to worry about this anymore as most new release DVD’s are non-anamorphic already. HD-DVD and BluRay are most definitely non-anamorphic and those technologies are already over a year old! Amazon unbox was released just this past summer, so they have no excuse to not offer this functionality.

I will not be renting or buying (not sure who’s “buying” movies that can’t move off their TiVo) any more Unbox movies until they address this atrocious problem. You’ve been warned.