When Plexing in a home theater with a 2.35:1 (21:9) screen and an anamorphic lens on your projector that removes the top and bottom letterbox from movies – think 16:9 screen clipped via lens… the Plex UI itself is clipped as well and hard to use/navigate. See: https://www.panamorph.com/
It would be nice to have a Plex setting on Android TV / Chromecast w/ Google TV to force the Plex UI to be “constrained” inside an imaginary 2.35:1 aspect ratio viewport. In effect, even though the video signal from Android TV is still being output in 1.78:1 (16:9) … the Plex UI is rendered in a letterboxed viewport which is smaller than the fullscreen 16:9 full Android TV projection/render. Hence, the anamorphic lens clips the black bars from movies, but not from the Plex UI since it would be “fitted” inside the anamorphic (21:9) viewport. Outside of the new anamorphic viewport, Plex would still render a background color, although black would be recommended, of course.
Hope this makes sense and that I’m explaining it correctly.
Currently, I have to jump out of anamorphic mode (21:9 clip/stretch) on my projector back to 16:9 to navigate the Plex UI and then jump back to anamorphic again after starting a movie which is a bit of a hassle. Shouldn’t Plex make things a little easier for and accommodate Home Theater enthusiasts with anamorphic screens/projectors?
There’s already an existing feature suggestion asking for an option to get a 2.35:1 or 2.40:1 aspect ratio for the app itself for projector based setups. Despite that other suggestion being quite dated, please comment/vote in that thread in order to avoid distracting or cannibalizing votes.
You have a constant-height projection setup, but you’re using a CCwGTV?
(I’m not scolding, I’m just amused. Technology is hilarious.)
Obviously I agree with @tom80H about the single feature suggestion thread, but I have a question -
Don’t those Panamorph lenses stretch-and-squish the image? I thought they were used by outputting an “all pixels”, full resolution 17:9 or 16:9 image through the projecter, and using the lens to reshape it.
When using those lenses, I don’t think Plex should artificially letterbox either the UI or the image.
The 21:9 movie is played in 16:9 with top and bottom letterboxed via AndroidTV through the projector. When you put the projector in V-Stretch mode, the projector is accounting for the panamorphic lens being attached and it crops off the top and bottom black bars, in a sense, stretching vertically the remaining 21:9 image into the 16:9 projector output, obviously this is distorted. The lens then re-distorts the photons coming out of the projector back into the correct 21:9 aspect ratio to match the 21:9 screen for which it is being projected on to.
It looks beautiful for all 21:9 movies.
However, the projector isn’t aware that when you go back to the Plex UI, the top and bottom are being cropped off and you cannot see this area of the Plex UI.
If there was a way to force Android TV to constrain the UI to 21:9 that would solve the issue, too. But, I don’t think this is possible or is Google interested in adding such a feature to Android TV.
My only recourse here, is to have Plex squash its UI to 21:9 and leave the top and bottom areas empty.
CCwGTV plays all the 4K HDR content I can throw at it… and I can control it via Phone or Remote. I can’t think of a more simple or elegant solution as an input to my projector.
Ohhhhhh … OK. Right. Well, that’s gross. Of course you want a bright 21:9 image, but the whole industry … what a stupidly Rube Goldbergian system.
(The price of those lenses, wow! At that point, just buy a brighter projector! ZOMG!)
(Plus the hilarity of IMAX Enhanced being the latest fad … and it’s basically 16:9 …)
Instead of a player box & projector crop-and-stretch, consider using Plex HTPC. It could stretch the image for playback.
Adding another computer (HTPC) to my network just to stream some Plex content? And I have to control it with a mouse? What a farce. The whole idea/usefulness of CCwGTV is the ease of control with the remote. Sounds like a two steps backwards solution.
You don’t/can’t use a mouse with Plex HTPC. Some people use mini keyboards but that seems tacky to me. I’d use a remote or would control it from the Plex app on a phone/tablet.
It’s unlikely Plex will implement a 21:9-in-16:9 underscanned UI option on a $40 player. I’m not opposed, and the CCwGTV is a nice device, I just wouldn’t hold my breath.
Plex HTPC would be a bigger project, but it exists today. And because it could do the AR pre-compensation, it might keep you from needing to change projector settings.
It’s a shame the projector can’t drop out of stretch-and-crop mode when it detects content outside the 21:9 region.
Clever wording you’ve devised for this FR! Thank you! Changed the topic line.
I wasn’t aware Plex HTPC was remotely phone controllable. I will have to test it out now for sure… flash Ubuntu on an old laptop or something.
From my first glance at HTPC, it looked to me like I had to program against an API to handle all of its functions which I wasn’t really too enthused about. Definitely sounds like I need another look.
Yes, you would think a $10,000 projector would be able to handle something like what you’ve mentioned WRT to auto-AR switching! VPL-VW715ES Black HDR Home Theater Projector | VPL-VW715ES |Sony US Perhaps it does, but I couldn’t figure out how to trigger said action on my own.
Sadly this is out of scope for the Plex app as it would require the underlying Android system to handle support or for us to recreate every screen in our app to support such a scenario.
