As the widescreen aspect ratio becomes more popular, many homeowners are building theaters in the widescreen format (2.4:1, 2.35:1 as examples). The trouble is PLEX does not currently support this and the user experience is less than desirable.
Issue when using a widescreen format:
In order to project on widescreen to view a widescreen formatted movie, the projector has to be zoomed in, leaving the black borders (top and bottom) outside the screen viewing area. This is a very common practice and works perfectly to allow the movie to fill the screen. The issue is when going to the PLEX interface (anything other than the movie) it gets projected in these areas outside of the physical screen, onto your walls and ceiling if it is low. Depending on your room setup, sometimes the buttons cannot be seen at all. It’s a very unpleasant frustrating experience, to say the least.
There are workarounds, but they are either expensive or not a good end-user experience. Some advanced projectors allow you to configure zoom settings so you can toggle between widescreen and 16:9. This is not ideal as you have to toggle each time you bounce between watching the movie and the menu. You have to press a button, and wait for the projector to zoom in/out - it’s just simply not enjoyable. You can also use an anamorphic lens, but they are very expensive and not affordable for many of us.
Simple solution to solve this:
Provide a “Widescreen” setting that the user can choose to support widescreen formats. When selected PLEX will put its own black bars on the top and bottom so that the entire PLEX interface is shown as widescreen all the time, then no menu buttons will appear outside of the screen. If we happen to watch a 16:9 video in this format it will simply have black bars on the left and right (which we would expect anyway). Also, the video player (play/pause) controls would have to be shifted up when this is enabled, so they too don’t appear outside of the viewable area (within the black bars).
(the bottom image is skewed - this is simply for illustration)
This is best suited as a setting for the HTPC players but could be applicable to other players as well. This is a missing feature that many people find frustrating. There are other players on the market that support this, but their either too expensive for the average consumer or they are simply just not as refined as PLEX. Please add this feature and make PLEX the best it can be! This is really holding PLEX back for home theater use on widescreen. Please HELP - there are MANY OF US!
I hope you will consider prioritizing this to the top of your backlog!!! -Thank you!
There’s already an existing feature suggestion discussing an option to adjust the aspect ratio of the Plex app’s user interface. I suggest you comment/vote in that thread in order to avoid distracting or cannibalizing votes.
Unless I’ve missed some unique aspect of your suggestion I’ll close this thread thread as a duplicate.
My intention is not to distract or cannibalize votes from the other post. My goal is to clearly articulate the issue. The other post is rather vague and quite honestly this issue is sprinkled throughout many different posts, though it never seems to be articulated well. I would link to this post as they both have 2 votes at this point, this post includes a lot more detail on what the issue actually is. Though please do whatever makes the most sense to get this issue noticed. It is a REAL painpoint. Thank you.
If you notice on the post @tom80H linked to, there are multiple other threads with discussion too.
But here’s some feedback from Plex devs:
Although that refers to Android I suspect the underlying reasoning (“underlying system support” or “recreate every screen”) probably applies to all players & platforms.
Hello Volts, yes I’ve played around with the zoom levels. This has nothing to do with that, this is about the Home Screen and the Video details screens and all the other settings screens that get projected outside the borders of our physical widescreens. To reiterate we simply need the PLEX interface to include the black bars top and bottom, just as if you were watching a widescreen movie on a 16:9 screen. This way we can zoom the projector in to fill the space and never have to mess with the zoom levels again. I hope this makes sense. The picture should illustrate the issue. Tapping Z or zoom is great for formatting videos to your liking but it does nothing to help with the UI.
I understand; I’m just pointing out that “UI underscan” has been requested and has gotten similar responses from Plex a couple of times.
There’s a similar conversation about subtitles being projected onto the wall.
You could use a real 21:9 projector, except they don’t exist. It’s also funny that Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray have 4:3 support but not 21:9 support. And that HDMI only got “real” 21:9 support recently.
How does the projector behave if it receives a 21:9 signal? Is a custom output resolution from Windows possible?
How do you handle all of the content coming out in Digital IMAX / IMAX Enhanced? It’s Immersive! (lol) That must be infuriating.
Hi Volts, indeed it is frustrating. There are solutions, such as an anamorphic lence, or MadVR but you’re talking thousands of dollars. I can’t justify that when I’m able to do it with a few button clicks to zoom in/out. It would just be nice if PLEX allowed you to set your screen to 2.4:1 ratio, then limit EVERYTHING within the black bars. Then you can play any aspect ratio you want and the bars would only ever appear on the left/right depending on the material. Then you can use the Z method to stretch it - or do whatever. I’ll play around with this inputmaps suff, but I have little faith that it’s going to work. It’s just so frustrating when the fix seems so simple. Again - Kaleidascap supports this OOTB.
An anamorphic lens would trade for a different set of complications anyway.
MadVR isn’t expensive … unless you’re talking about their HTPC product. There’s some stack of Kodi DSPlayer + madVR + Plex for Kodi that people use. But there’s still a projection cutoff problem you have to deal with somewhere.
I’m not saying it wouldn’t help you, I’m just saying that I think the basic “underscan the UI to 21:9” request was already answered by Plex in those linked threads. The UI is 16:9 in HTPC, and it’s 16:9 in Android.
Hence my request to also comment / refine the discussion in the original thread. It’ll do little good if there’s “dozens” of suggestions on the same topic which all end up without any noticeable support.
When the resolution of the screen set in Windows is a real 21:9 resolution, the UI is rendered in 16:9 within the limits of the 21:9 resolution (so with vertical black bars on the left and right). And when playing a movie, the full 21:9 resolution is available (and you can zoom to compensate 2.35:1 movies embedded in a 16:9 file (horizontal black bars encoded in the file)
Does the projector support a 21:9 resolution (conserving aspect ratio) ?
@tom80H I’m not arguing your point - but if the initial post isn’t clear often the details of the issue get buried in the comments and people will just skim over it.
@Volts You are correct, anamorphic lenses and Madvr pose their own problems, neither are a %100 fix. Truly the best solution would be for plex to support widescreen as a configuration. Hopefully, if enough people vote on this, they’ll take it seriously. I know it’s a frustrating point for anyone using a widescreen with a projector and PLEX. This isn’t a small crowd as these things all go hand in hand.
I wonder if the PC graphic card has an option to do the resolution conversion. I remember Nvidia cards have an option to convert a non-native resolution set in windows to the native resolution of the connected screen. I used that to play old game with low resolution (1024x768 for example) because screen have very bad interpolation algorithms when dealing with non native resolutions. With this option my screen received his native resolution (1920x1080). The card was doing the interpolation job.
