[WMP11]- how to stretch the movie to remove the black bars?

[LuckY7]

I just got a widescreen monitor and I have a bunch of widescreen DivX movies that are in 4:3 ratio. How can I adjust the settings in Windows Media Player 11 so I don't see those black bars?


-i tried the zoom feature but it didn't remove the bars. any ideas? tks.

[mats.hogberg]

If they are 4:3, they aren't widescreen. If you use ffdshow, you can set it to crop the video (before passing it on to WMP)

/Mats

[LuckY7]

so do i crop the video, save it, then open it in WMP11?

is this what most of you guys do when u need to get rid of those 'black bars'?

I really appreciate the response I'll give it a try.

[mats.hogberg]

No, you just configure ffdshow like this, then open the AVI in WMP (or any other DirectShow player) and ffdshow should "kick in" and crop the video as it's played back.
Permanently removing the black bars would require reencoding of the video, and that's something that should be avoided, unless not absolutely necessary.

/Mats

[LuckY7]

wow, thats really cool. this is the best idea so far! this definately beats my idea of using divxplayer to 'resize' by zooming in, which would ultimately distort quality. as soon as i get off work i'll give it a shot! tks.




-makes u wonder why WMP11 cant just have a 'widescreen' feature that crops automatically.

[mats.hogberg]

makes u wonder why WMP11 cant just have a 'widescreen' feature that crops automatically.

Well, usually wide screen video is wide screen video, not wide screen video inside a 4:3 frame. WMP doesn't take a peek at what you're playing, and go "Hey, there are some useless black borders encoded into this video - I'll remove them!".
Furthermore, it assumes square pixels in AVI, so if a video is 640x480 px, it'll be played back at 4:3 AR. If it's 640x360, it will be played back @ 16:9. This is in contrast to mpg2/DVD, which will "always" be 720x480, but can be played back at 4:3 or 16:9, depending on a flag in the mpg.
Some video codecs used in AVI also has this kind of AR flag, but far from all players recognize this, and will merrily assume square pixels (which is the AVI norm).

/Mats