First, thanks for showing and interest in my post.
It appears the scanner/media analysis only looks at the width and height of the media to determine the aspect ratio of the movie. However, in the case of 2.4 aspect ratios, which include black bars, that differs from the actual film’s aspect ratio.
If the scanner/media analysis can be adapted to determine the aspect ratio of the film, that would be great. But it seems like it would be much easier to just grab the aspect ratio provided by the IMDB, when gathering things like plot, tag lines, etc. The former seems like it would take a great deal of time to implement, and more prone to error.
Here is an example of a 1080p and 4k remux for the same movie.
How do fix it, I can’t really. What I have done is create a workaround. I manually use Labels within the Sharing tab to indicate the aspect ratio of the film.
Then I use that data in my automation to set the projector’s aspect ratio. (Tautulli, MQTT notification, Home Assistant, Harmony Hub IR, Projector.)
Kind of convoluted, and some day if aspect ratio of the film was correct in Plex, AND Plex exposed the aspect ratio in the webhook (both of which are not true today) I could bypass a great deal of that workflow.
To Volt’s point… that’s not what the scanner/agent will cover.
File analysis is handled separately (but to some degree triggered when adding new media).
I suggest you create a feature suggestion for what you have described here. If you want to we can move that last post and make it a feature suggestion
Thanks for the reply and offer to move this to a feature suggestion. There is already a feature suggestion from 2013, which I raised from the dead twice over the years. That was completely ignored for nearly a decade. I suspect if you move this over then a moderator will close it because of the previously ignored one.
May I ask why grabbing one more piece of readily available data about a film and incorporating it into Plex’s new infrastructure that will “provide you with the best metadata in one place” is a non starter? If you are trying to improve the infrastructure and start from scratch, as described in the first post, seems like an opportunity to get more data, and why I posted in this thread. Hoping to get it front of the people creating the new infrastructure.
The Aspect Ratio of a film is defined, known quantity, just as is the director, the tag line, etc. There is no need to create work for another Plex team and ask them to reverse engineer this information.
Are the various Plex team’s so silo’d that throwing work over the wall like this is common place?
Anyway, sorry if my frustration comes through. Any chance you could leave my post in place, so there is a chance that a developer working on this infrastructure might see value bringing more data into the new Plex source?
In theory you’re right… that assumes the encode you got (be it from a DVD, Blu-Ray or whatever source) is matching the original aspect ratio. There’s tons of material that wasn’t just scaled but has been cut or squeezed to fit the target size.
You are absolutely right on the variability of the encode creating variability in the calculated aspect ratio. You can’t trust that data to be correct as a result. So the theory comes into play when trying to determine the aspect ratio from the media through analysis. And as a result this avenue will likely fail.
But there is no theory when determining the aspect ratio of the film (not the media file.) The film’s aspect ratio is a known quantity. The first result from google pulls the info from the IMDB.
Sure there are some Christopher Nolan films where he has fallen in love with IMAX and throws in segments with varying aspect ratios. And while his movies are great, those are a handful of outliers.
I’m happier if I don’t try to think of Blu-ray as part of the digital world. They never wanted those files to be accessible. Blu-ray only supports 16x9. If the media isn’t 16x9, black bars are encoded on the disk.
Fun fact, many film prints aren’t fully matted. The final hard matte is only applied at projection time in the movie theater.
So @Alitchy, take comfort. You’re recreating the authentic experience!
Your solution with labels is clever and I think it’s your best bet overall. It wouldn’t be that hard to use the IMDB/TMDB APIs to request this info, but I think you’d still want to validate it.
It also wouldn’t be that hard to “cropdetect” your existing media files. I think that would get you higher fidelity data for your purpose.
I’m surprised you didn’t correct the letterboxing and AR when you re-encoded Endgame. Is there a reason you didn’t do that?
Can you share a link to the feature request you mentioned?
Yeah, I was lucky enough to get in on the constant height bandwagon before my daughter was born, many years ago. Had the disposable income then to purchase a Stewart, 2.40:1 aspect ratio screen, and have been using various projectors (CRT and DLP with an anamorphic lens) over the years to show movies in that authentic experience. Love it and wouldn’t want to go back watching Scope movies in a 16x9 window with letterboxing visible.
I used to re-encode all my movies to reduce the size, back in the day. Now with storage prices being so cheap (especially if you are willing to use HDs pulled from data centers), I built an unraid server and rip and remux. Faster, and maintains quality. I sometimes have a smaller 1080p file for use on smaller TVs in the house, no point in having Plex beat up when my daughter wants to watch something in her room.
It also helps that I buy much fewer movies than back in the day. I only go after the ones I really enjoy (like the MCU movies) and then stream the rest via Netflix, Disney +, Amazon prime.
Here is the feature request thread on this topic: Aspect Ratio
I didn’t go into as much detail in that thread, but would be happy to do so, if someone thought it would help.
The bars are the problem. Plex has no concept of these bars are. It just knows there are pixels, so it uses them according to what it’s told from the rest of the file.
I’m not familiar with the requests you are talking about but if you provide links I can re-open if they are still valid. Also requests don’t always get implemented.
Not entirely true. The aspect ratio is how the film was released in the theater. This may not be the same for how it gets released when it ends up on a disc.
I get the need to move this out of the other tread. A little disappointed it will get much less visibility, but I get it.
I also understand that the way Plex determines the aspect ratio (only looking at the file’s width and height) is broken and the way non 16x9 aspect ratios are presented within that 16x9 space was never taken into account by Plex. Since the Aspect Ratio pendulum for major motion pictures has swung back to Scope (2.39:1) ratios, this method fails to get the Film’s aspect ratio the majority of the time.
Odds of Plex investing time in scanning the the media, calculating the number of pixels that make up the bars, subtracting that from the height to get the movies true aspect ratio is > 1%. I understand why as technically that will have issues and be unreliable.
Aspect Ratio is the feature request thread. It’s open, and I recently bumped it. I realize that feature requests are rarely implemented, Plex has to prioritize their work and that most people don’t care about the film’s real aspect ratio. Figure there is no harm in trying to get their attention every year or so
Nothing is certain or 100% in life, but most modern movies are presented on blu ray with the same aspect ratio as what was presented in the theater. The days of pan and scan home video releases has been over for along time. IMAX is probably the biggest exception.
The information from IMDB would be vastly superior to the current way Plex is determining a film’s aspect ratio - which is guaranteed to be wrong for 2:39:1 films, as you have pointed out. I guess it might be correct for re-encodes where people removed the black bars to save space?
Anyway, I see where the wind is blowing on this topic. Plex, and their moderators are not looking to change things. Lots of effort to explain why the current broken mechanism is still better than bringing over less than 6 characters and calling it the original aspect ratio in Plex’s meta data for the film. Yeesh…
It’s not broken. Plex is detecting what is in the file. If you encode a file with black bars, it’s not like there is something in the file that says, hey these are black bars ignore them.
Plex also looks at more than just the resolution. When encoding a file, there is also a parameter known as the pixel aspect ratio. Plex uses this to determine the aspect ratio the display should be and will scale correctly. For example, I have files that I’ve cropped the bars off so the file is 1920x803 with a pixel ratio of 1:1, giving an aspext ratio of 2.39:1, which will play correctly. I also have files that have 1920x1080 resolution with a pixel ratio of 4:3 making it 2.39:1 overall and also play correctly.
The problem is the bars. Most Plex players cannot just ignore these bars. The Plex Android app is able to fill a screen which will push the bars off the screen, but other Plex clients can’t do that.
Lol. 1 vote. Also, that’s just to store the value. Having that info won’t really change anything. I don’t think that request is really what’s needed. What would be better is for other clients to be able to scale the image like the Android app.
