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Toxicologist wrote:Well, i've taken the guy from Cinedoc at his word and have ordered this dvd today, hopefully should have the dvd within a week or so (France - UK) so will certainly report back on my findings.

Just to let you know i received the dvd today and after a quick spin i can CONFIRM that the transfers ARE WINDOWBOXED contrary to what i was actually told from Cinedoc themselves so am very disappointed to say the least in that respect.

Shit, you must be rather pissed off about that. I wonder why you were given the wrong information. Perhaps is was a language related issue and they didn't properly understand what was being asked. Are you going to keep it or send it back? It's a great selection of films but not so great since you were expecting non windowboxed transfers.
Thanks for the information.

Don't think there was really any misunderstanding TBH as the guy seemingly had a very good grasp of what i was actually asking and how he initially responded as he seemingly understood what i meant by 'windowboxing' etc.....anyway, it's disappointing but on the whole i'm satisfied and will keep the dvd.

I've just spent a very happy weekend ripping McLaren's films to my iPod Classic - thanks to MPEGStreamclip (probably the most-used bit of freeware on my hard drive), I was able to crop the picture to get rid of the windowboxing, and the end results look great: unlike most live-action films, McLaren's work translates very well to the tiny screen.

If anyone else wants to try something similar, the crop settings I used were:

Top - between 21 and 23
Left - 28-30
Right - 28-30
Bottom - 21-23
(the precise figures are determined by repeatedly previewing a short clip)

...with the final video file a 320x240 MPEG-4 file. Select "export to MPEG-4" and click the 'iPod' button. I also opted to deinterlace, but I don't know if that makes any noticeable difference. Oh, and my source was the NTSC edition - I imagine the crop settings will be different for PAL.