Menu aspect ratio considerations for widescreen DVD

Hello all:
I'm building a DVD with widescreen content. My intent was to build widescreen menus as well, as this would ease the use of my widescreen video for menu backgrounds (no need for panning) however I've noticed that when I create widescreen menus in Encore, they show up letterboxed on a 4:3 TV when my DVD player is set to letterbox widescreen content. At first, this seemed to make sense, however I've since observed that none of my commercial widescreen movies behave this way. Rather, they fill the screen entirely on both my 4:3 TV and my 16:9 TV, regardless of how the DVD player is set to deal with widescreen content. It's almost as if the disc provides different sets of menus for both cases, or that the menu contains directives to force the DVD player to do pan-and-scan in the 4:3 scenario even if the default behavior of the player is to letterbox.
Am I making any sense?
Basically: Is there any way to create widescreen menus and guarantee pan-and-scan on a 4:3 display, or else provide both 4:3 and 16:9 menus and have the player decide which to use? It seems the commercial DVDs must be doing one of these things...
EDIT: Incidentally, one of the popular DVDs I tried was The Matrix: Reloaded.
Cheers,
Aaron

>Basically: Is there any way to create widescreen menus and guarantee pan-and-scan on a 4:3 display...
Not using Encore, no. Encore 16:9 menus will be displayed letterboxed on a 4:3 monitor.
It may be possible to hack it post-authoring, but I'm not sure. Take a look at the tools on videohelp.com. If it is possible, you'll have to design your menus so the buttons are within a 4:3 safe area, and also have to live with the difference in pixel aspect ratios.

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