On the Xbox 360 app, it seems as though all of my 720x480 DVD rips (m4v/mkv, h.264, aac) play with black bars around all the edges (top, bottom, left, right) as if the movie can't stretch to cover the entire screen. My 4x3 videos play fine (bars on just the sides), as well as the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray rips at 720p/1080p (fills the entire screen.)
The DVD rips all play fine on my Xbox One so I don't think the issue lies with the video files (or at least I'm hoping, seeing as I have quite a few of them.) Anybody else having this problem??
there is a menu, where you can trun this off. Maybe you all have wrong configuration. And actually a search in the forum would have done the trick as well.
I have this problem but have found a way around it.
I no longer play games on my 360, so its used exclusively as a media device. I have the official xbox media controller, and if you repeatedly press the display button on the remote it cycles through a number of display modes. Original, Stretch, Zoom etc. What options occur depends on the format of the playing video.
I am not sure what the alternative option is using a 360 gaming controller.
I’m also seeing black bars all around my 480p movies as well when viewed via Plex on my Xbox 360 (all of which view correctly when played through my Chromecast v2 on the same TV and via the same server setup and cast via Android app).
We are able to reproduce this issue with 4:3, 480p video. We are looking into addressing this issue in future releases.
Thanks,
It’s definitely with the 480p DVD movies which were produced before widescreen TV was the norm. I’ve ripped a couple and Kill Bill (post 2000) comes out fine on all platforms including the Xbox 360 but any older DVDs (Aliens special edition, Commando, A Force Of One) have the border all around the picture. The format of TVs at the time was 4:3 so the players must have converted the picture to fit the TV. Roku, Chromecast, Android devices, Smart TV all show the films full screen with no borders at all - its a bug with the Xbox 360 App.
Same here 2001 ripped from DVD plays in a black border on all sides, on the Xbox one Plex app., it looks like it would fit full screen if I could zoom or change the screen resolution.
Found the fix; you have to encode the video with cropping set to automatic. I had my encoder set to none so it encoded the vertical black bars on the old widescreen letterbox format movies. When you set cropping to automatic in the encoder it removes all black bars and the video goes right to the edges. If there are vertical black bars plex adds horizontal bars instead of extending the image past the vertical bars (over-scan) thus causing a black border around the entire video. Some devices work around this limitation such as the iPad; it had no problem over-scanning the vertical bars out of the picture and displaying the video as full screen. Xbox One, Playstation 3, Chromcast and also Amazon Fire TV all would not over-scan the vertical bars. I am not sure if this is a hardware or Plex software limitation but the only way to get rid of it for me is to re-encode without any vertical black bars encoded in the video itself. This also happened on 2 different TVs so I do not think this is a display limitation, the files also played fine in VLC player on the PC and on the Mac so it is either the media players or Plex or both.
The problem I now have is to re-encode every wirescreen letterbox DVD I own in my collection sigh DO OVER! If I knew then what I know now LOL! I re-encoded the movies 2001 and 2010 with cropping set to automatic and now the video makes it to the edges of my TV and plex adds the normal horizontal black bars to fill the rest of the screen, hoary…Problem solved…sort of.
