real widescreen viewing on widescreen displays ?

[caipirina]

Hello folks,

we as mac users are blessed with a 15" and 2 17" widescreen displays (and then there are the studio displays, which i do not know) ... but on the other hand it seems we have only one DVD player software ... one QT and one VLC .. and they all seem to fail to address my following problem:

e.g. i have some old old DVDs that have the black bars on top and bottom burnt in ... so apple DVD player 'feels' it must be a 4:3 dvd and puts black bars on the sides ..

same with most mpeg files (e.g. the nicely done in widescreen "enterprise") and lots of divx files ...

I end up, having a great widescreen display .. and the movie I am watching has black bars on all 4 sides !!!

On my widescreen TV I have a button where I can toggle through several modes .. one of them called "cinema", which just blows up the pic to fit in, basically cropping the top and botton (thus you can watch even old Star Trek eps in widescreen .. well, lots of heads seem chopped off at times)

now .. is there ANY software out there dealing with that (and no, I do not feel like running a 750 MB file through Cleaner 6 to have that whole thing cropped ... i actually tried .. but it crapped out on me)

anyone else wondering about that ? At least apple should address that in its DVDplayer .. i mean, they are the ones giving us widescrfeen laptops ..

cheers and greets ''
P

[AntnyMD]

Video hard-coded to 4:3 aspect and letterboxed looks like crap when zoomed into to simulate anamorphic widescreen, no?

[caipirina]

well .. those hard coded DVDs are usually old crap anyway (old horror movies, 3 on one side of one disk) .. but it still beats TV reception and just looks better than having something in 16:9 AR, but with inches of blackness on all 4 sides ..

as for QT and Divx ... well .. there are trade offs in compression and resolution anyway ... but i'd love to use as much of my screen as possible ... some divx are encoded without those top / bottom bars and when played in fullscreen they stretch nicely all the way to both sides ...

[shreddies]

Use VLC's cropping feature (have to switch on advanced preferences, then its in the video filters). It will cut off the black bars so that you can fullscreen the widescreen image.

[caipirina]

That is great news .... if only i could find it ....

I am running VLC 0.5.3 and have advanced prefs on .. and went through all of them: Interface, Audio, Video, Input, Decoders, Encoders, Stream output, CPU, playlist and misc ... no video filters ...

any enlightment here for me ?

but if that works, then i'd be so happy ...now QT needs a feature like that too

[shreddies]

Preferences, Video, scroll to the bottom, select crop from the video filter module, click select.

I had problems where it wasn't sure how to crop the image so was a bit jumpy, I solved this by letting it autocrop and then watching the console to see the size it had cropped it to when it got it right. I then switched off autocropping and set it to that size.

[galactica]

I have a 22' cinema display. Playback of dvd or dvd-r's for that matter usually always play with no black bars. SVCD always plays with black bars, because of the resolution they are encoded at, the black bars on the svcd are actually apart of the viewable area (if that makes since to you)

I understand what you mean by the black bars being on all sides when you view "DVDs that have the black bars on top and bottom burnt in" and also SVCD. Unfortunately there is no way to remedy this situation on your TV that I am aware of.
I too have a 16:9 TV which will display these black bars on all 4's for SVCD. Clicking the "cenema" feature will remove them, however its more of like a blowing up function and you are then cropped on the right and left and loose viewable area.

Dvd's do not experience this problem, as they are encoded to fit this 16:9 size with no problems. The only way would be to somehow reencode the dvd/mpeg/divx you have to an equal resolution of a dvd.

I have tried myself doing this, but either get:
1. svcd that wont playback in my player
2. black bars on top and bottom with an even smaller and stretched 16:9 image!!!

eventually, i gave up and decided that If i want it to not have black bars, id just encode it as a proper dvd.

[caipirina]

Preferences, Video, scroll to the bottom,

beating myself very hard for not noticing the scroll bar !!!

thanks .. wil try with that

[caipirina]

am i stupid or what ?

I tried exactly what has been said here ... and the autocropping results in NOTHING .. no cropping going on ..

the console is just giving me stuff like

Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8718
Looking for devices matching vendor ID=1193 and product ID=8717

and that's it ...

what type of numbers should i try just for fun in th ecrop window ??? i tried 16:9 .. that did nothing ..

cheers

[shreddies]

I tried exactly what has been said here ... and the autocropping results in NOTHING .. no cropping going on ..

Oh, not sure why its not woriking :/

what type of numbers should i try just for fun in th ecrop window ??? i tried 16:9 .. that did nothing ..

I had to look up the source code to find out! It needs to be the actual pixel size with an 'x' eg 720x468

[gregorym]

simple,

your old dvd's are not 16:9 anamorphic. they have been mastered with the letterboxing.

case in point - enemy of the state

till they re-release that one correctly formatted. you're stuck with the 4:3 version.