Both my TV’s will upscale SD live TV channels to 720 fine from 480. However, my wife records tons of shows form SD channels and when viewed with Plex, the do not upscale so the picture is effectively 24" diag on a 32" TV making it too small.
I’ve read all the upscale posts and there doesn’t appear to be a solution to this but if i could change the actual ffmpeg transcoder settings, it might work.
What’s the TV or player device?
Plex doesn’t transcode-upscale content. Player devices can choose to play back at the original resolution, or stretch to full screen.
Almost (?) every TV has the option to expand smaller content to the full screen height or width.
No need to upscale. In your TV Plex app, start playing a video file. Pause, bring up the interface (the progress bar and pause button). Select the Triple Dot option, and choose Playback Settings. Make sure the Display Mode slider is moved over to Letterbox. This will stretch out all videos, maintaining aspect ratio, until either the top or sides bump the edge of the TV. For ultra-widescreen content, this leaves a bar along the top and bottom. For narrow content (typical in 4:3 or SD quality content), it will add in bars along both sides to center the video.
If you leave Display Mode at Original, then it will never “upscale” the image to fit your screen. Letterbox should be the default and should always be picked.
Note: Changing this slider here will change it for every video played on this device as well, so no need to change it every time.
Unfortunately there is no display mode option on the Roku Plex App.
Well, I’ll be tuckered. I just checked my Roku app, and do not see such an option anywhere. (Agh, forgot to look, but maybe it’s buried deep in the app settings, not the playback settings).
Roku Remote → * button → Picture Settings → Picture Size or something like that, at least on my Roku TVs.
But I’m wondering if that’s not the whole issue. Can you share a sample of one of these videos?
There are no picture settings or zoom options on the Roku Remote. It appears that any program streams that have a 4:3 aspect ration will not upscale, but SD programs in the 16:9 format will scale to fit the screen. I record both OTA and cable broadcasts and what format you get at any give time with OTA programs is anyone’s guess.
This SD file format upscales:
File Format: MPEG2-TS[MPEG2-Video 16:9 480i@29.97fps, Dolby Digital/128Kbps@48kHz Stereo eng, Dolby Digital/96Kbps@48kHz Stereo spa]
This SD file format does not upscale:
File Format: MPEG2-TS[MPEG2-Video 4:3 480i@29.97fps, Dolby Digital/224Kbps@48kHz Stereo eng, Dolby Digital/192Kbps@48kHz Stereo spa]
Let’s make sure we’re using the same language!
Does the picture fill the screen vertically - are there black bars at the top and bottom?
Can you share a picture?
yes, the reduced picture is centered with black bars on top and bottom of screen. i can get a picture if necessary but i think i’ve described it ok.
Can you view the files in another program, such as Windows Media Player and/or VLC? I wonder if the bars on the top/bottom might be part of the original video itself (yeah, some people letterbox their 4:3 with top/bottom bars for some stupid reason).
It’s unlikely to be the case here, if you are talking about recent OTA recordings… Hm.
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