The problem lies within the movie producers. They use a 21:9 aspect ratio instead of a 16:9. This feature would get rid of that, but quality will be modified. This would be nice if it we’re closer of a ratio, but the difference is extremely noticeable. Kodi can do this, but in most cases it looks terrible. Best solution is honestly to get a ultrawide monitor or TV if they have them. This will have black bars on the side for 16:9 videos though, TV shows are normally that ratio. Pick your battles.
So you are telling me that even pretty much 100% of the TV you see at Best buy are the wrong format for watching movies? I just got a new TV today which cost over $5,000 and its the wrong format!
So Kodi is like a Plex that can change the Aspect ratio?
To be honest the black bars ruin the experience for me. I can’t stand to watch a movie and not use 100% of my TV screen.
Maybe Hollywood should be more focus on making movies with the correct Aspect ratio for about 99.9% of the TV on the market and less concern telling people about their stupid causes.
Plex really does need to give people an option on the aspect ratio. Especially when it has been out for years and its 2018 going on 2019.
Yes, in fact Plex was built on Kodi, formally XBMC. You can use Plex within Kodi and access these settings. Movie producers choose this because of how much more you can fit in the screen. It is stupid, but if people used theaters for viewing it wouldn’t appear to have those bars. If they made it for TVs they would argue that the cinematic experience is not as good, which is stupid.
I can’t say for specific devices on if Kodi can be installed. I know they have official apps for Windows, Mac, Linux, Xbox One, Android, iOS, Raspberry pi, and a couple more. It’s open source so in theory it can be compiled for any device, just installing it is the harder part. Once you have it installed go to add-ons and click the box icon and search for Plex. It will now appear under video add-ons. First time you open the add-on it will make you use the code sign in thing. After that it’s normal Plex and has a few additional features from Kodi. The screenshot shows the add-on screen. The box icon is in the top left. Download link though: https://kodi.tv/download
You assume there is only one standard aspect ratio and there is not.
This is nothing new and has always been a “problem” since the first HD TV of 720 was introduced. Even back then these new 720 (and 1080 shortly followed) where 16:9 aspect ratio while most of the content available was all broadcast or DVD and was 4:3. Those new TVs had black bars on the sides for nearly everything you could watch unless you were able to find “wide screen” DVDs.
Things are much better today as most new broadcast is 720 or 1080 but watching any older tv show/movie will often likely still be in SD or DVD quality and will have black bars.
Many movies filmed/shot for movie theaters will use a different aspect ration then 16:9 since the theater screens are different then your TV. Often times you can get the same disc in multiple aspect ratios. Some people prefer the edited 16:9 so it fills the TV screen while others will want the original aspect ratio so they can view it just like it was shot.
You’ll get used to this in time as we all have.
BTW, what new TV did you pickup? Congrats on your purchase. Did Santa come early?
Mobile applications Plex for iOS and Android can change aspect ratio to Full screen 16x9 by double tap. Why can’t do this for all Smart TV players? Add simple button click and zoom to Full screen.
It’s been a “problem” a lot longer than that. The academy ratio (a 1930s standard) is not quite the same as the old tv 4:3 ratio.
But in 1927 Abel Gance decided to push the boundaries of cinema for his final battle scene in ‘Napolean’ and shot a panorama scene using 4 cameras and splicing the film together. The “aspect ratio” was like nothing ever done and to my knowledge it’s never been done since.
I can’t believe this guy is going on about this. His previous uneducated rant on this subject was already shut down.
I said it before, a projector will solve all your problems. In the mean time, google is your friend, go and learn.
Oops, it was 3 cameras. But still, big long panorama to give the audience an idea of the scale of the war. Not possible with the academy format and even more effective than the current (edit: ultra widescreen) 21:9 format.
Edit (again): I’ll add that the 5 hours leading up to this is in academy format. So how do you go from full screen to full screen when the ratio changes? Aspect ratio changes with in movies are - perhaps not standard - but common enough.
I am interested in a Zoom to Fill (cropping) feature. I have both high definition home videos and movies that appear more aesthetically pleasing when filling the screen. I understand that this is a subjective topic but this is something I’m missing from both the Roku and Web browser that is available on the retiring Windows app UI. I don’t see a problem with just having the option.
I realize that this feature may be device-dependent, but it would be great if it could be supported on the platforms that allow for it.
At least in the web browser please support Crop/Widescreen Borders/Zoom/Aspect Ratio.
As ultrawide monitors become more common there is a real need for this.
Blu Ray rips are commonly ripped/encoded at 16:9 aspect ratio regardless of the film’s native aspect ratio.
Star Wars, Alien, and many popular 70s/80s movies were filmed in ultrawide aspect ratios (commonly 2.39:1).
Currently the only way to fill the screen while viewing these 16:9 rips of ultrawide content is to manually re-encode the film manually at the desired aspect ratio.
Clearly adding some basic picture adjustments to the plex player is needed.
I suggest checking out VLC for a good example of how to implement these features (at least in terms of UX).
Instead of this (seven year old) request going nowhere because of missing player support, Plex should make an effort to support this server-side, i.e. transcode the video with the (crop) header flags in mind. My server is not strong enough to transcode HD video, but I have tons of DVD movies with black borders (one particular movie is 16:10 in a 4:3 frame, which means it has borders all around), and I would definitely favor transcoding in those cases. Simply saying it’s not possible and then waiting forever will not accomplish anything.
I found a similar request in the Kodi forums, where a guy from the Kodi team said that ffmpeg didn’t support the cropping info (don’t know if that’s still the case), so the Plex devs may have to write some code if they want to implement that. But I’m sure that that’s an easy task, considering Plex is first and foremost a media player.
P.S. Five votes is not enough. Or alternatively: Plex should start to work their way through some of them.
Support for this would be lovely, especially if it were to make use of cropping headers from MKVs. In the hope that they would be supported someday I already added these to every remuxed file in my library.
I can imagine that client support is rather limited due to the system-specific players being used (zoom support or an “overscan” like projection on the screen should suffice but may not be supported), but at least on the server side for transcoded streams this should be quick to implement. Even if ffmpeg itself doesn’t support/respect the headers, reading the headers and then applying the natively available crop filter to ffmpeg for the transcode (i.e. as an additional parameter to ffmpeg) would do the trick.
I would love a feature like this aswell,im a ultrawide user and most movies being recorded in 2:39/40:1 aspect ratio it would be perfect for my monitor…
sadly i see this topic is quite old and no feature has being added yet you have my vote
but MKV being the awesome container that it is, has a Crop option and an Aspect Ratio option. I set the crop option to get rid of the black pixels. And I write 16/10 in the aspect ratio…
Which is great. This is what I want. No black bars, correct aspect ratio. All without re-encoding. But when I open this in Plex (Plex on Android TV-Nvidia Shield) it recognizes and respects my 16/10 Aspect Ratio override BUT NOT the cropped pixels.
Is there anyway to get plex to honor these MKV Crop Parameters?
Good morning. Not that I’ve found. What i use for filling up the screen (multiple choices of aspect) is VLC player using the PMS upnp mediaserver. Probably have it for Nvidia Shield. Good luck & lemme know.
There is already a “Display Mode” option on Android, but it stretches based on the width of the phone (mine is wider than 16:9) instead of a specific aspect ratio. Roku has a similar stretch feature for its smart TVs, but there is no option for controlling this on its external devices. The Windows and web desktop players seem to lack any display mode options.
In addition to adding Display Mode to all players, we also need a way to specify the aspect ratio. On some live TV channels and recordings, the aspect ratio that is being broadcast is incorrect. Shows are either too wide or too narrow because of this. Adding an option to override the DAR of a video would make this easily fixable without having to alter the video files after the fact. A simple toggle of Default / 16:9 / 4:3 would be a good start.
Ideally, all Plex players would have options that mimic VLC’s options for Aspect Ratio and Crop in addition to the options that already exist for Display Mode.
This seems to have been asked for repeatedly in the past and never implemented.
you have my vote
