I’ve got a DVD box set of a 90s British TV show which was originally shot on tape not film. I’d love to convert these into video files so I can watch them on Plex and keep their original 576p resolution (as they’re PAL).
But because this show was originally meant for broadcast only and it was also an age of CRT televisions… there is a little bit of blackness (and minor distortion) at the edges (horizontally) at the beginning/ends of the scan lines.
Normally a television would overscan by about 2.5% or 5% and thus you’d never see that portion anyway.
It seems silly to crop this bit out when I convert from DVD to video files… as I wouldn’t have a 576p video file when maintaining 4:3 aspect if I did that… and it would be a something I can’t “undo” should I want it back (e.g. if playing on an old TV that does its own overscan without any choice).
Is there a button we can push to force Plex (in any and all versions of the player, including web) to overscan a little on older programmes that have this kind of thing?
Unfortunately only a few Plex client types support zooming the picture. Namely Plex for Desktop and Plex HTPC.
And even these need to be taught first to do that:
I mean I’m not expecting Plex to do any kind of processing of the video file. If they added a “correct for overscan” button to every player… then even on the web version they could just render the < video / > tag (if they even use it) to be a a little bit bigger (so the top/bottom edges are outside of the viewable web page… and add some small black borders left/right)… to simulate a small zoom in.
I guess on other stuff like PMP for Roku this might be more difficult unless other trickery can be done to fake a zoom in?
I’m afraid not, unless the Roku has an overscan setting on the system level.
I know the nVidia Shield has one, but that’d need to be activated/adapted manually each time you want to play such a video.
But I don’t see the usefulness of storing your videos with these analog artifacts included, anyway. Just crop the picture during the encoding process so that only pure picture remains. All Plex clients will zoom to fit such a file into the visible video area.
If you want to later revisit the video for e.g. applying better upscaling, denoising etc, you are better off working with a file that is as close to the source as possible. Which is not what is most convenient/compatible to use with a media streaming server.
If you can afford the storage, I’d recommend storing an “archival” version of the rip for later processing.
