I have an ultrawide (21:9) 1080p display.
I've recently started ripping my 4K UHD blu-rays and watching them on my monitor when I don't feel like watching on my 4K TV in the living room.
I'm using madVR to convert the HDR to SDR and that's working fine.
And obviously my 1080p display is only displaying 1080 vertical pixels, despite 4K's 2160 vertical pixels. But the image is still sharper than a blu-ray, mostly because the bitrate is higher on 4K blu-rays.
So far so good.
Now, because I'm using an ultrawide monitor (21:9) I love cropping the black bars on a 2.40:1 widescreen movie and filling the entire monitor. My question is... does JRiver scale down the file to 1080 before cropping the black bars? Meaning I'm seeing less than 1080 after I crop the bars because it blows up the pixels after the crop... or does JRiver crop the 2160 file and then scale down the image to 1080 for my monitor so I'm still seeing a true 1080 pixels after cropping the bars?
I hope that makes sense.