Letterbox and amorphic movies shrink

Community Archives WD TV Play Discussions
1

with amorphic and letterbox movies on my HDD - .iso format - the movie does not fill the screen. For instance on my 37" WS TV the actual movie is only about 27" diagonal. It will not come close to the sides of the screen.  They work fine in my DVD player so I figure it is a software problem with the WDtv.\

Any chance this could be fixed?

2

Are you saying the movie is “Squished” horizontally?

If the original content is anamorphic, it should fill the screen (if you’ve set the WDTV to widescreen mode).

Letterbox movies won’t be expanded vertically… nor should they, as that would distort the image.

3

I’ve set the WDTV in all formats but it is in widescreen. the picture is not squished. It is merely smaller than the screen with black on all sides, both vertically and horizontally. In other words, the picture is in the proper aspect ratio but fails to fill the screen horizontally.

4

I thought black on all side (top,bottom,left,right) suggests it’s a “Matted Widscreen Format” ?  (not anamorphic)

Sounds like you are experiencing ( B ) in this forum :http://www.avsforum.com/t/229038/clarification-of-presented-in-a-matted-widescreen-format

If it displays OK on your dvd player … maybe the dvd player is overscanning the picture (eliminating the black borders) ?

Or maybe the input on the TV where the dvd player is connected the aspect may be set to “Zoom” ?

(My panasonic TV, i can set a different aspect for all inputs eg. AV1=4:3, AV2=14:9, AV3=16:9 etc etc)

anyway, just guesses :neutral_face:

5

With TV and WDTV set up properly you ought not have a problem.  I have some very early DVDs that were made for the older 4:3 screen (Letterbox) so on a widescreen setting they are framed by a black border on all 4 sides, and do not fill a screen in wide format as current DVDs can do.  These kinds of movie formats need to have the TV set to zoom mode.to see the picture fill out the entire screen, otherwise you see a letterbox frame that only fills half the screen.

6

Handbrake (which uses VLC, so you’ll have to download that as well) has an excellent cropping/resizing feature that will do its best to remove black borders.  There are a lot of settings to tweak to balance file-size versus picture quality.  Under the video tab, mine are:

Framerate = same as source w/constant framerate

Avg Bitrate = 4000 and do 2-pass encoding (doubles the time of the encoding)