Some (but not all) of my DVDs are showing distorted video around the edges. I have a Philips "upscaling" DVD player sending video via HDMI to a Philips 50" plasma TV in 1080i (audio goes out via optical with no distortion or problems at all).

The image on screen has a non-linear horizontal distortion, where the image in the centre of the screen is fine, but becomes horizontally stretched at the edges of the screen - approximately 10% of the image on each side. This creates a fishbowl effect similar to looking through a security peephole in a door, and it's damn annoying!!

It only occurs on some DVDs (examples include "Mission Impossible 3" and "The Guardian"). Does this have anything to do with the DVD encoding format, i.e. 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen? Some kind of panoramic processing issue?

Video settings are as follows:

DVD player - TV type set to 16:9 (other options are 4:3 letterbox or 4:3 pan & scan), HDMI video set to Widescreen (other options are Superwide or Off), 1080i output

TV - picture is set to Widescreen (other option for HDMI is Auto Format)

I have tested every combination of these video settings that I can think of, with no luck fixing the problem. Normal widescreen tv signals from Freeview HD get resized just as you would expect (a 4:3 picture is evenly stretched to 16:9).

So why is the distortion only occuring around the edges? Please help...