Thread: NEED HELP :A Technical ISSUE

Hi , every one....
This is a screenshot i've taken from my media player classic while playing A christmas Carol ....the question is what is the name of those black bands that exist with nearly any video i play....and what to do if i want to get red of them.....from time to time i like to through a movie i love to my usb pendrive and watch it at TV via my FMCB modded PS2 ...and every time i wonder if i can play my movies without those annoying blackness....i want to enjoy the whole picture at my TV....
Can someone help....
thanx..

Those black strips are there because you resized the width of the media player far greater than its width:height ratio can handle.

If you want to remove them, decrease the width of your media player. Those black strips arent part of the movie, they are just white space(should be black space since its black, but whatever) that are there to make up for the lack of video in those areas.

I see you are using Media Player Classic. There is an easy fix to your situation.

Open your file and right click the video.
Go to video frame -> Override Aspect Ratio

If the borders are only on the top and the bottom, then the video is probably widescreen, which is 16:9. If the black bars are on the left and right, the picture is 4:3 which is fullscreen.

Just set it to one of those and it'll take up your entire screen!

The above solution will work, but it will stretch the video and look distorted.

You can get rid of them by adjusting the "pan and scan" range with your remote. Most TVs should have that option. It will increase the size of the video but you will lose a little bit on the sides because you don't have a widescreen TV. If you google "pan and scan" you'll get to the wikipedia page which explains it all.

Are those bars hard coded into the movie, or a result of you resizing the window?

If you open the file using MediaInfo it will tell us the dimensions it was encoded with.

Codec ID/Hint : XviD
Bit rate : 526 Kbps
Width : 640 pixels
Height : 272 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 2.35:1

I'm not sure if that top screenshot was taken at the original size, but if it was you should see one of the following numbers in the Media Info output.



608pixels if the bars are hard coded and 435 pixels if they're not hard coded (Or there abouts, they were rough measurements.

Q

Originally Posted by orangejulius

I see you are using Media Player Classic. There is an easy fix to your situation.

Open your file and right click the video.
Go to video frame -> Override Aspect Ratio

If the borders are only on the top and the bottom, then the video is probably widescreen, which is 16:9. If the black bars are on the left and right, the picture is 4:3 which is fullscreen.

Just set it to one of those and it'll take up your entire screen!

Yes... thank you very much it worked fine...I accept the picture that way ...but the strange thing is that when i play a movie on my player on a TV it also has those black strips ....so it might be from the movie itself not from the player...

Originally Posted by qaw

Are those bars hard coded into the movie, or a result of you resizing the window?

If you open the file using MediaInfo it will tell us the dimensions it was encoded with.

Codec ID/Hint : XviD
Bit rate : 526 Kbps
Width : 640 pixels
Height : 272 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 2.35:1

I'm not sure if that top screenshot was taken at the original size, but if it was you should see one of the following numbers in the Media Info output.



608pixels if the bars are hard coded and 435 pixels if they're not hard coded (Or there abouts, they were rough measurements.

Q

Well ...I don't exactly understand what you mean but here's my media info about that movie...and by the way it's not movie specific ...all my movies play that way on my pc....and they are all from similar sources(DVD rips XVID from axxo and others)

640 x 272. They're not hard coded. But the ratio is 2.35:1. So no, you will always have black borders top and bottom, unless you zoom in. This will cut off the right and left of the picture.

A HD widescreen TV/Monitor often works on 16:9, 1920x1080.
1920x1080 = 1.778:1 so any movie presented in a display aspect ratio of 1.778:1 will have no black borders.

This is not the case with your movie

1920/640 = 3 (width is always stretched full, it is the larger dimension, 3 times the encoded witdth to fill the width of a HDTV)
272 * 3 = 816 (since we maintain aspect ratios we have to do the same to the height)
1080 - 816 = 264 (816 falls short of the total vertical screen space, so we have to pad 264 of the vertical pixels with black to maintain the movies aspect ratio)
264 / 2 = 132 (which is 132 pixels top, and 132 pixels bottom)

If zooming in to get rid of them you would only see what is in the red box below (roughly).



Q