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  1. Member
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    Really hoping someone can help. I have searched for hours and have had no luck.

    Basically I've got bunch of avi's that are 4:3 ratio, and they look ridiculous on my TV when I play them using the WDTV. I'd like to change them to widescreen.

    I have tried every setting available on MPEG4Modifier and the file just looks the same after no matter what setting it's on. I thought maybe it was windows media player just not showing the new ratio, so I tried them in media player classic and VCL, still no change, just to be sure I tried them on the WDTV, and sure enough, still 4:3.

    I tried editing them with virtal dub and had the same results (but then I have no real idea what I'm doing with that).

    So, I'm hoping someone will have an idea of how I can change the ratio so they look watchable on my TV. And don't have the black bands down each side of the picture, since the TV is set to widescreen display.

    Any help and advice at all is greatly appreciated.

    Thanks.
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  2. Always Watching guns1inger's Avatar
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    You have what is essentially a square peg that you want to fit into a rectangular hole. To do this you have three choices.

    1. The most sensible choice. Leave it well alone. 4:3 is 4:3, and 16:9 is 16:9. Live with the black bars, as this is how it is meant to be. Any problem you have with viewing the image this way is a personal problem, not a technical one.

    2. Leave them as they are, and use the zoom function of your TV to make them fit. This will make them soft and fuzzy, but you will lose the bars.

    3. You can resize the image to stretch it horizontally to fill the screen. This will remove the black bars, but it will produce a distorted image where everyone looks short and fat. You can do this with the resize filter in virtualdub, but you will have to re-encode. There are plenty of Virtualdub guides for this.

    4. You can crop the top and/or bottom off the image to make is fit the 16:9 shape. However before you go merrily cropping you have to understand that material shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio is framed for the 4:3 aspect ratio. It will fill the frame top to bottom, so just doing a straight crop will remove important parts of the image, such as heads. If you seriously want to take this approach then you need to use an editor such as Vegas that allows for key framing of the image position. You can then set up your crop area so you know what space you have to work in, and hand animate the position of the frame within the 16:9 area so that the important parts of the image are always in shot. It is slow and time consuming. A straight, or blind, crop can be done in virtualdub. Again, you will have to re-encode your video to do this.

    Basically you are trying to a do a vertical pan and scan, as opposed to the old horizontal pan and scan that was used to destroy widescreen movies for 4:3 TVs. It is a pointless exercise in most instances because it does damage for no benefit.

    I guess I just don't understand your problem. Most movies, be they widescreen or fullscreen, require some black bars, regardless of the TV shape you have. Very few movies are shot to exactly fill a 16:9 or 4:3 frame. On my 4:3 TV I watch widescreen movies with black bars top and bottom. On my 16:9 TV I watch 4:3 movies with black bars on the sides and most widescreen movies with black bars top and bottom.

    I say the bars are there because logic tells me they. I have never actually seen them when watching a movie because, well, I am watching the movie, not the bars.
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  3. Member
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    Thanks for the reply.

    It's not a movie, I'm used to them when watching movies, I, like you don't notice them when watching a movie.

    It's a TV show, I'm not used to black bars when watching TV shows, so they bug me. As I'm sure there are things that don't bother me, but would bug you. It's personal preference.

    That said, I do greatly appreciate you taking the time to reply and explain to me the technical side of the issue. Obviously that's information I was missing, since I don't have anything beyond a basic understanding of aspect ratios and how/why they work.

    Since I'm not interested in cutting bits off of the video, I'll simply learn to live with the black bars, or not watch the videos which have them on.

    Again, thanks for replying.
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  4. Always Watching guns1inger's Avatar
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    Try playing with you TV's zoom. I know mine has several levels of zoom, some of which allow me to position the image up or down within the frame. It might be a matter of finding a compromise between a full zoom in with no bars and lots missing, and a partial zoom in and shift of the position to make sure that heads stay in shot.
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  5. I'm a Super Moderator johns0's Avatar
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    If you dont like to watch with black bars then set the tv to 16:9 and watch it stretched,if you want to watch it with proper 4:3 with no bars then zoom it but you will be missing parts of the top and bottom,no way to watch full screen in 16:19 without missing parts of the picture or watching it stretched.
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  6. Member
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    Thanks for the replies.

    I've messed about a bit with the display settings on the WDTV, oddly if I set it to 'normal'display, instead of 'widescreen' it pretty much removes the black bars from the sides. Not totally, but it's bearable.
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