Why do some movies play back with “unused black bars on the screen” on BOTH top/bottom AND left/right?
I understand that if the aspect ratio of a movie does not match that of the screen, you cannot get all such “unused screen space” to go away unless you clip what the director meant you to see (which is offensive to many). But I do not understand why the system does not “automatically zoom to the max possible before that would happen”.
It seems like “black bars” should only be necessary on EITHER vertical or horizontal (but not both) without having to lose part of the frame/content.
Am I missing something, and what I’m thinking is simply not true? Is there some way to do what I’m looking for?? Any explanation/help would be greatly appreciated.
Black bars on every edge only happen when your video files themselves have black bars encoded in them.
For instance if your file is made from a very old source, like an older DVD
and has a 4:3 aspect ratio (AR) picture
and then contains a movie in 16:9 AR, so the full picture has black bars at the top and bottom.
If you now play this video on a screen that is 16:9 AR
then Plex will treat it as a 4:3 video.
see the following graphic
the white area is the movie content in your file (this area has a 16:9 AR)
the black bars are in your file, they are part of the video picture (together with the movie content this is a 4:3 AR)
the gray area is the screen area of your playback device for which there are no pixels in your file
This is actually one of the reasons your TV has/had a Zoom Feature… to deal with older DVD material with the ‘keyhole’ mode of encoding. Find it, use it, or as Otto suggests, recode it.
If you use Plex Media Player (top of the forum/downloads/get an app) you may be able to find a combination of the special view settings in the TV View that will help it out, but note that you’ll have to return those to their defaults afterwards - most likely.
Thanks Otto; no one has ever explained that to me, rather they just suggest TV “zoom”.
What you say makes sense to me, though I am not sure how I verify that my files include their own black bars right in the encoding. Can you recommend a tool where I can see this, and even better “recode the video file and cutting off the black bars top and bottom in the process”?
Thanks as well, JuiceWSA. I am aware of zoom, but never found a way that “only” maximized view while not cutting off content.
I do use Plex Media Player. And hunted thru it looking for viewing solution (without success) before posting the question. What area of the app are you referring to when mentioning “special view settings in the TV View”? I don’t see any “TV view” section in mine.
@diwPlex said:
What area of the app are you referring to when mentioning “special view settings in the TV View”? I don’t see any “TV view” section in mine.
Juice is referring to the “full screen / TV” view mode of PMP.
first, go to the Home page in PMP, then click this button:
^^ Yep - in the settings while in TV View - probably Video - there will be some special settings for ‘Mangling’ the Video… fiddle with those and see what you come up with. Temporary use of those would be recommended so you won’t ‘Mangle’ everything.
Also - if you have PMP dragged over to the TV - through the trusty HDMI hookup - you can control it with your Phone’s Plex App (assuming you have one of those - doesn’t everyone? lol).
@diwPlex said:
What area of the app are you referring to when mentioning “special view settings in the TV View”? I don’t see any “TV view” section in mine.
Juice is referring to the “full screen / TV” view mode of PMP.
first, go to the Home page in PMP, then click this button:
After going into “tv full screen” mode (as Otto shows with arrow), clicking the account button (top right) and selecting “settings”, and the “Video” section of that settings-popup dialog, there is ONE OPTION CLIPPED OFF THE BOTTOM OF THAT DIALOG… but if you click scrollbar-down twice, you will then see a “Video Aspect” option.
Knowing the above option exists, now…
Selecting “Zoom (can crop off video)” will actually completely fix the playback in the following situation (which as Otto explained, is exactly what I have):
A 16x9 movie with hard coded black bars top/bottom in a 4x3 video file, being played back on a 16x9 screen.
The “zoom” option (explained above) crops exactly what you’d want cropped, and you see exactly the 16x9 content in the 16x9 screen with no content loss (i.e. only the hard coded top/bottom black bars, and the would-have-been-injected-during-play right/left gray bars, seen in Otto’s graphic, are cropped out).
You may notice (never tried it myself) the aspect ratio is a bit mangled (squished/stretched). For this reason you don’t want to use it unless absolutely necessary.
