Zoom in for PC/Web

[Daz]

Hello

Before I get in to it, I’m aware of > Crop Widescreen Borders/Zoom/Aspect Ratio and Remove Black Bars However they don’t seem to cover my feature “idea” as they are asking for auto crop/roku/android/etc/etc…

I’d like a +/- control or % to zoom in to my video on PC/Web plex movie. In general I believe this should just be an end post-process option. I take this is driven by openGL? Just scale the matrix a little and were done, please…
in MPC I can simply press 9/1 to zoom in/out.

My 4k HDR video in MPC
The same image in Plex (by the way thank you for HDR support!)
Mod-Edit: links to pasteboard.co as images don’t show properly

There is no reason to lose soo much of the video data due to wasted space.

Thank you.

[tom80H]

looks like your image uploads to pasteboard have failed…
so not exactly sure what “loss of video data” you’re experiencing.

[Daz]

Yeh passing links here somehow don’t work, just take the web link above and palce / between .co and the name. Should display 2 images with issues. Or just click on “broken” image and it will take you to website.

[tom80H]

Looks like something went wrong when you encoded that video.
Have you considered fixing this to start with?

[Daz]

I did not encode video, its just normal black borders. I guess its just format ? 3840x2160, all movies have different levels of “black-bars” don’t they ? Down to production to specify actual video width/height.
I guess its “ok” when you have normal monitor, but I have one of those “ultra-wide” and sadly it does not look as nice as it could.

Normally a video player offers a range of adjustments to zoom in/offset the video. However I’m not seeing any in Plex… google seems to return quite few topics where people ask for it… so…

Perhaps its already in and I’m missing a setting?

Codec HEVC
Bitrate 64060 kbps
Language English
Bit Depth 10
Chroma Subsampling 4:2:0
Coded Height 2160
Coded Width 3840
Color Primaries bt2020
Color Range tv
Color Space bt2020nc
Color Trc smpte2084
Frame Rate 23.976 fps

Regards
Dariusz

Edit, thank you for fixing topic pictures! :- )

[tom80H]

The reason for black bars (today) is that disc have specifications for what video they should contain. For Blu-Ray based material that (usually) is 1080p, for 4K disks it’s… well… 4K resolution (2160x3840).
Your 4K material seems to be a wider-screen 1080p (21:10 vs. 16:9 aspect ratio) put in frames to meet 4K resolution.

That being said… I got your point. Just tried to understand why Plex should fix this – but apparently that’s the way they’re now selling 4K material

[Daz]

Hello

…why Plex should fix this

Well lets look at alternatives… Encoding video with different crop/size to avoid borders:

Pros:
a.No Black Bars

Cons:
A. 4k HDR takes around 50gb(some that I have are 80 other 30), Say I have 3 screens, Normal LCD, wide, Ultra Wide, thats 150~ gb per movie, not to include mobile/etc.
B. I do NOT have the original RAW file format, thus any re-encoding = lowering quality. No thank you. Whats the point of 4h HDR if I’m just gonna butcher it?
C. Codec not being happy with the non-standard resolution.

So yes, Plex having a basic post production control like - transform offset (move to left/right/up/down) video, + scale opens these options:
A. If I have subtitles, I can move the movie “higher” and have subtitles over black borders = GREAT
B. I can zoom-in to remove border on any device, I don’t want to change aspect ratio, just zoom in.

Technical job from c++ side. Well I take its openGL video stream on to quad, so what we have to do ? Add matrix * transform * scale, more or less. Math should be pretty “automatic”, GUI wise, that is probably more work, given movile/web/plex/desktop. But at the end, you need 4 butts, offset screen left-right & top-bottom, scaler screen bigger/smaller + reset.

OpenGl side is probably like 1h ? GUI wise, probably about a day ?

Benefits? I don’t have to store 150gb of video data per movie per device with lower quality.

Now why plex needs to fix it? Well because alternative products can do it, VLC/MPC etc etc. So if you want to keep my subscription going, that’s what I need. Else I will just look for streaming service that offers it. Or I’ll write my own and the open-source it :- )

Regards
Dariusz

[drdeb]

This is quite a fundamental feature for a 21:9 user, sad to see that it’s still missing.

Ideally all video files should be devoid of black bars (it should be the video player’s job to add them), but sadly that is far from the reality we are in.

(you can see this on YouTube also, where some content creators include the black bars in the actual video - example; videos like this will hold up terribly in the future, what if yet again some different aspect ratio will become the norm? it happened once with 12:9 -> 16:9, it can happen again…)

[o_spring]

See this workaround for the new Plex HTPC :

Using Plex HTPC on 21:9 aspect ratio screen

Here is the full json file : { "name": "Generic Keyboard", "idmatcher": "Keyboard.*", "mapping": { "Left": "left", "Right": "right", "Up": "up", "Down": "down", "Return|Enter": { "short": "enter", "long": "menu" }, "Back|Esc|Backspace": { "short": "back", "long": "home" }, // Standard text entry. There's no distinction between upper and lower case // letters. The optional Shift key is only a flexibility convenience. "(?:…

[CBMe]

Good workaround but Plex HTPC menu is a comparatively terrible UI for PC monitor use vs Plex for Windows, especially for 21:9 & 32:9 monitors.

Found this post that works for Plex for Windows. Doesn’t have the preset jumps but does the ± adjustments fine:

Video Zoom (Crop) in Plex Desktop app

Server Version#: 1.27.2.5929 Player Version#: 1.50.1.3176-06a9352d I’m an ultrawide user, I often have to zoom in to crop out hardcoded black bars, etc. I thought to myself “oh neat, plex has inputmaps, let me just bind some key combo to adding zoom”, but unfortunately they are completely non functional on plex for windows. They work on HTPC, but the exact same keyboard.json file i have for HTPC does absolutely nothing on Plex for Windows Any fix for this? It’s incredibly annoying to go into …

Really would love it to be a default feature where it auto crops in when in window mode and when in full screen, detects your monitor resolution and knows to crop in on the top/bottom black bars all the way, or until the left/right image is at the edge. My movies & TV are from disc so they have black bars encoded for everything not 1.78:1.

[boyinblue]

Hello,

Currently, for 4K blu-ray remux rips with hardcoded top and bottom black bars and a 21:9 display, there will be left and right black bars. It would be great if Plex web player could detects these kind of situations and automatically fit the video to screen.
Letterboxed 16:9 movie (hardcoded top and bottom bars) on 21:9

Others with this same problem:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/cox4yw/plex_media_player_4k_has_black_box_around_picture/

Discord - Group Chat That’s All Fun & Games

https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/dgs6l4/letterboxed_movies_on_plex_with_an_ultrawide/

As you can see in my screenshot as well as the one in Reddit, the picture can be zoomed in quite a bit before any video is loss. This really only happens on videos where the top/bottom black bars are hardcoded.

Thank you!

EDIT: Found a temp solution is to use Plex Media Player HTPC which have the zoom option. Can we please get this feature added to the web player?

[plissk3n]

-1 for automatic detection, this would make watching Nolan movies pretty annoying which have variable aspect ratios.

+1 for the option to zoom in on all players though.

[lollerskate]

After getting a sweet ultrawide monitor, I realise that most movies/tv shows have hardcoded black bars at the top and bottom of the video. This works well for 16:9 screens but results in a half sized video playing on non standard-sized screens like ultrawides.

A large number of movies like Dunkirk have scenes that change between 16:9 and 21:9. The video itself is encoded in 16:9. During 21:9 scenes, hardcoded black bars appear at the top and bottom. This reduces the actual content to just the center of the screen with an ugly black border all around.

Is there a way for Plex to automatically crop away the borders and fit the content to screen height?

A possible solution can be to detect and store border meta info on plex server and have the client automatically zoom the video during playback. No re-encoding is required.

When a new video is uploaded to Plex server:

1. Server runs border detection on the video. The true extents of the scene may vary through the film
2. Store border meta-info for this video
3. When playing the video, border information is streamed to the client
4. Client takes into account current screen size and border information to maximise the usable area for video play back

[anon18523487]

Plex Web doesn’t have a way to zoom. I believe it’s a limitation of using a Web browser.

Try using the new Plex HTPC app for Windows or Mac. That has a zoom option. Not the same as what you want but could help with seeing the bigger picture.

[lollerskate]

I’m lazy to zoom back and forth when watching movies. Usually I just leave it and watch the show with borders.

Feels bad to leave so much screen real estate wasted though

[mureev]

In my case black bars, commonly referred to as letterboxing, which are baked into the video preventing AppleTV Plex app to zoom in using double tap on the remote.

I agree that this one sounds to me like a server feature. To the point that video can be cropped as part of Optimize feature.

[emikzen]

It’s 2024 now and it’s time to add a crop/zoom feature that lets you crop to fit desired aspect ratio, ultrawide monitors such as 21:9 and 32:9 are getting more and more popular and we still don’t have this basic functionality.

There are so many movies and series that have 16:9 output regardless of what the original aspect ratio is supposed to be, this leads to black bars on the top, bottom and the sides on a lot of media.

I understand the point of wanting media to be watched in the original aspect ratio, but the lack of this feature is now a direct hindrance to that and frankly extremely annoying, having to open up VLC to watch a lot of the media I have is not the right solution and makes me want to use Plex less.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[BigWheel]

You can edit the input map to make keyboard shortcuts to do that. Info on that ( with specific details you can just copy for zoom options) can be found here. Use `mpv` features which are not exposed in Plex for Windows/Mac/Linux and Plex HTPC

[emikzen]

You’re a lifesaver thank you. I would still like to see the option added into the settings panel in the video player however.

[BustaCheeze]

It would need to be both a client and server feature. Server could handle it when doing encoding (preventing the client from needing to support it at all), and client would need to be able to handle it during decoding for direct play content.