I wanted to compare the quality of a Blu-Ray disc with the same movie (National Treasure 2) recorded in HD on the DVR. When I was doing this, I noticed that the picture was a bit bigger on the top and bottom of the screen from the recorded DVR content. I figured that the Blu-Ray just showed the whole picture and the one I recorded just cutoff some of the sides, but no that is not the case. The Blu-Ray of NT2 is in letterbox format, and I tried adjusting several settings on the player, but to no avail. Also some of the previews are shown in the bigger format that are on the blu-ray disc, so it seems to only be the movie that's missing anything.

My question is, are all Blu-Ray discs like this and we miss some of the movie for no apparent reason? It seems pretty lame that they would cut off some of the top and the bottom just to make it seem more widescreen than it really is. Once again the movie definitely has more picture information from the HD content I recorded from the movie channel, and it isn't just a case of it appearing that way. Neither of them are missing anything on the left or right side, just the blu-ray is missing some of the top and bottom.

I tried searching for this in Google, but I really don't know how to go about finding the answer to such a thing. My first few searches yielded no helpful results.