Noobe Aspect ratio question

[jafa38]

I've just done my first xvids and they all play back nicely on my standalone 642. Good so far.
I have an older model Sony 4:3 TV and when viewing 16:9 movies the horizontal black bars are huge. TV display is ok , the THX video setup on a commercial DVD works fine , but the same problem. Can I "stretch" the vertical component by say 20% . I dont really care if it looks a bit funny , just want less black.
TIA

[jimmalenko]

You want to wreck the part of the picture you're actually watching, just so you see less black ???

That's robbing peter to pay paul if you ask me.


Maybe there's a setting on your DVD Player (Zoom, or similar) that might reduce the black bars a bit ?

[jafa38]

Strange as it seems ...thats what I want it to do. Unfortunatly the zoom function does't work. Is there any app you can use to set a non standard AR ?

[junkmalle]

I've just done my first xvids

What does that mean? Are you just burning some Xvid AVI files onto ISO DVDs and using the 642's ability to play Xvid? Are you converting Xvid AVI files to standard movie DVDs and watching them?

Is there any app you can use to set a non standard AR?

Just about every video editing program has resize functions that let you fiddle with the picture dimensions. It will take time and you'll lose a little quality by reencoding though.

[jafa38]

Hi junkmalle , yep done both of those. I used AutoGK to resize a 16:9 copy of a kids movie to 4:3 but the vertical strech makes Spongebob look really silly. For some reason my 4 year old doesn't appreciate widescreen & buying a new TV is not on the cards for a while.

[guns1inger]

educate him ....

if you cant zoom then you will have to crop the ends off before encoding

[junkmalle]

If you crop off the edges of the frame the picture may get blurry since you're, in essence, enlarging what's left. And you may find that you're missing important picture elements. A professional fullscreen production will pan-and-scan in an attempt to keep important details from being lost. You might want to just buy the fullscreen edition of the movie.