Getting the aspect ratio correct for Horton hears a who

[alehel]

I'm currently using the blu-ray disk "Horton Hears a Who" as an "experimentation" file. I'm basicly trying out various settings to try and learn as much as possible about the encoding process to try and work out the best procedure for me. I'm doing pretty well at the moment. With this file there is only one thing left that is bugging me, and that is the black bar on the top and bottom of the film. Now according to the box, this is not an anamorphic film. it's a 16:9 movie. At first I couldn't see anything strange about the picture so I went ahead and downscaled it to 1280x720 and ripped it. When watching the file in VLC though I noticed a small (very small) amount of black bars on the top and the bottom. These were not taken away by the auto crop. I therefore reloaded the file in HandBrake and tried to manually crop it. I ended up taking away 14 from the top and 24 from the bottom. When doing this I noticed that HandBrake had selected anamorphic "loose" for me for the picture, despite the fact that the input picture and output anamorphic were both 1920x1080. Why is it suggesting anamorphic when the aspect ratio ends up being the same? My second question is related to the cropped picture. After cropping I end up with 1280x688 instead of 1280x720. If I theoretically wanted to get the best picture quality I can achieve here for my Apple TV, should I use anamorphic to set the resolution as 1280x720 and then use anamorphic to have the picture displayed as 1280x688 or should I just leave it at 1280x688? At the moment I'm thinking I should just leave it at 1280x688 as using anamorphic would give me the wrong aspect ratio? Can I simply increase the resolution to 720 and still use it on my Apple TV, despite the fact that it's width would be more than 1280?

I may have got these number slightly wrong, but the concept would still be the same regardless.

Hope I made myself clear.

[mduell]

It's turning on anamorphic so that the storage resolution can be mod16 (or mod4) but keep the display resolution correct.

[alehel]

Just looked up mod 16 on the internet and here on the forum. Now it suddenly makes perfect sense. Thanks for the info.