Yeah, I’ve tried that, it’s more a limitation of the projector itself - it only projects in a 16:9 format, regardless of the resolution. So the fix is to mask the top and bottom of the screen with black bars and voila you have a widescreen format, zoom the projector in and life is good. It really should not be a complex fix and they could limit it to just the HTPC players. Please PLEX team - are you listening? 
Just to be a smartass -
You scoped out the other feature suggestion thread, but the way it is presented is missing some broader details. You hope a reframing will lead to the desired resolution?
(I’d suggest you take @tom80H’s advice and vote for and add details to the existing request - it’s not a long thread, it’s already got some votes, and a bunch of other threads refer to it. Maybe the subject could be improved!)
With the graphic card card option you set a 21:9 resolution (1920x800) plus you activate the « hardware interpolation » : your projector would receive its native 16:9 resolution (1920x1080 I presume) but the card would add itself the black bars to « fill » the resolution of your screen so you would have a forced 21:9 projection… but I never tried that
That’s an interesting idea! A video card would be physically capable of doing that, if only the drivers allowed you to configure it that way. I wouldn’t expect it to be called interpolation maybe?
My suggestion was to just send the projector a 1920x800 signal and see if it would display it with 1:1 pixels. If that worked it would still project a 1920x1080 image.
If the projector could do that …
… or if Windows could do that …
… or if Plex could do that …
… or if Blu-ray wasn’t a ridiculous standard …
… or if there wasn’t a new “best” aspect ratio every 10 years …
But that points out how ridiculous this entire problem is.
@keypixel I’ve solved it: You need more money, a bigger house, and at least one additional theater.
Slightly more seriously … just don’t use the UI. Fling content to it from a phone or tablet.
Here is the option. It must be set to « aspect ratio »
2 Likes
Lol more money, bigger house, I’d just go with Kaleidascape if it didn’t cost a small fortune. I’ve already spent way more than I should have on my AV equipment!
I have workarounds, using the phone or table is one, but still you are left zooming in out, when it switches from 16:9 to 2.4:1. I guess I’ll just have to wait and hope this gets noticed … and keep playing the loto.
You could always use a 16:9 screen.
Yeah, I have low ceilings and a widescreen format suits my room much better As we discussed there are workarounds, but none of them are user friendly, especially not for my wife/kids. It’s a shame Plex doesn’t have a fix for this, it’s such a simple thing really. I did get the keymaps working, thanks for the tip, it’s great for refinement of the video - but doesn’t do anything solve this problem. This issue is with the user interface, not the videos.
UI is hard to do well.
Only a small fraction of people are using projectors, and a smaller fraction of them are overspraying or curtaining a screen.
Did you look at @o_spring’s suggestion? It’s the best idea I’ve seen. It might help in other apps, too.
Hello Volts, I do know what’s entailed with UI dev, I spent over half my career doing it. Granted I don’t know how the PLEX code is structured, what we’re talking about here is simply changing the viewport, and adjusting some player control positioning. We’re not talking about restyling the entire application. You are correct that it only a fraction of PLEX users are projector owners, zooming onto a widescreen. I do think you are underestimating how many people this really is. Or that they have simply given up on PLEX b/c it has not gotten any attention over the years. They have simply moved to other options. It’s a bigger market than you think and it’s the enthusiast market. I’m on many theater forums, and most have given up from the conversations I’ve had. I’m giving this the old college try with all the info I can before I go investing in other solutions. Sadly, I’m close 
I did see o_spring’s suggestion. I have not tried it yet, though I’m doubtful it will work with my projector or any projector. That said I’m willing to give it a shot. It may be a few weeks before I’m able to as I don’t have my projector hooked up as we are remodeling our theater. This isn’t something I can test virtually.
I appreciate all your help, don’t take me the wrong way. I just think this is a larger, overlooked market than what folks think.
I’m pretty optimistic about @o_spring’s suggestion. It would still emit a 1920x1080 16:9 image to the projector, while giving Windows a 1920x800 display to work with. I hope you do try and report back. It might help others as well.
My counter-evidence is that 21:9 projectors aren’t available, not for love or money. Somebody would make one and fleece the market, if there was a market.
And I don’t have a short screen, so I don’t care anyway.
I’ll give o_srpings method a try. It will just be some time.
They make anamorphic lenses to solve this problem. Lots of folks have them and they are well known, but VERY expensive - we’re talking 10k ish.
I’ve thought about writing an application to solve for this. Essential it would be a parent application (16:9 aspect), then pull in the PLEX app as a window or frame of that application in widescreen format. This would solve the UI issue. The problem is then when the movie plays I have to go back to fullscreen. In that case, I could leverage webhooks to listen for the play event, and then I could change my window frame to go fullscreen. Unfortunately, if the video was 16:9 or anything other than widescreen it would fail. And the player controls would still fall off the sceen. I’m not keen to do this as a hack, as it still has issues and it would take me a lot of time to write.
That’s the problem (and not that I fault you) but unless you are a projector owner in this position you don’t care. That’s fine if you aren’t in the business. But IMO PLEX was made for people who love to watch movies. They’re missing out on some of the people who really love this stuff. I don’t quite get it TBH.
You know… enough with PLEX, I think I’ll go back to XBMC (cough, cough) I mean KODI. That’s where my roots started with all this anyway (I modded my original XBOX about 20 some years ago) Afterall PLEX was a rip of XBMC anyway. Looks like these guys have figured it out, they must be pretty smart 
…
https://kodi.wiki/view/Archive:Ultra_Widescreen_(21:9_aspect_ratio)_skins_for_Kodi
They don’t help this problem, I think - UI falling outside the screen edges. Those help with brightness from 16:9 projectors. (But since there’s no anamorphic content, when a 16:9 projector is in “stretch” mode there’s a 3/2-pixel vertical scaling weirdness. And they add another “need the remote” setting to deal with.)
That’s similar logically to what the video card output settings change would accomplish. Output the necessary 16:9 aspect to the projector, but restrict Windows to a smaller viewport inside that.
For sure. There are at least 5 votes for the feature!
I’m a little bit surprised that the better projectors can’t be set to a hard 21:9 mode, forcing Windows (or whatever) to detect them that way.
That’s just the 5 people left that are still holding out hope for PLEX, the other 5k users have abandoned ship
Those are all basically dead though, aren’t they? I’m not familiar enough with Kodi to know.
Edit: the Kodi skins, not the people. LOL
Not too sure TBH. I’ll have to give it a DL and play around with it.
1 Like
Man, this KODI interface is a blast from the past. I got it working and it only took 10 minutes. I was able to use the AEON NOX SiLVO skin. I’ll be honest it’s not as pretty as PLEX, it really brings me back. Though everything is on the screen contained within black bars top and bottom, so in this case functionality wins. I guess I’ll keep PLEX as my server and use KODI as my interface. Pretty sure that can be done - just need to play around with it some more. I sure hope PLEX solves for this at some point. It would be nice.
Neat!
I’d like to share this video as a reference, widescreen theaters are trending as more and more people build them in their homes. The audience for this functionality is large and growing. Supporting widescreen functionality would catapult PLEX to be one of the best options in this space. Especially as it becomes more affordable. Widescreen Explained | What are 16:9 & 2.4:1 Aspect Ratios? | How Panamorph & Lens Memory Work - YouTube
