cutting out black bars on videos so they fit better on widescreen?

Hey everyone,

do you know if theres a way to play video files which were saved in a 4:3 aspect ratio on widescreen? Some videos, although they are widescreen format, are saved with black bars on the top and bottom to make it 4:3, I was wondering if there was a way to make the computer ignore the black bars, so that the video will be stretched better.

thanks.

 

you might be able to re-encode the movie without the black bars... good luck finding the program to do that

i remember my old geforce 3 ti nvidia card could "zoom in" on the screen, maybe you could find a program to do that and avoid the hassle of re-encoding movies

 

It's not possible if you're watching straight off retail DVD

If you're willing to go to the trouble of re-encoding; http://www.bobsomers.com/articles/encoding-dvds-to-high-quality-movie-files-with-xvid-and-ac3-1/ See third item in the contents list

P.S. Most film's are still widescreen if you check properly. It's just that the widescreen Hollywood chose for the film doesn't match your laptop...as this noob understands it Probably wrong reason, but it is still widescreen

 

You can do that in powerDVD...

 

Check out the DVD box. If it says 16x9 (~1.86:1) then you should get no black bars on a 16x9 tv (or laptop). However if it says (~2.35x1) then you're out of luck. It's the way some studios shoot their movies, and they made widescreen tvs in the former ratio so both will fit without resizing. It's lame. Like everything else in technology, companies couldn't agree on a standard. Because of that, those of us with widescreen tvs still get letterboxes (albeit smaller than 4x3) on certain movies.

Re-encoding would probably be more trouble than it's worth. The studio wants you to see the movie in its "true form".

 

These aren't on dvds, they're avi files ususally. anyway, il try powerdvd as mujtaba suggested.

 

I've found VLC to be very effective at removing the reverse problem- vertical bars on 4:3 playback, and the playback (after fiddling with the filters etc) was unbelievably smooth on a system with 64 shared (and pretty crappy) graphics. Much better than powerDVD which I also tried. If I wasn't worried about losing the codecs, I'd probably ditch powerDVD altogether..

 

Media Player Classic ........kicks ass on those bars.