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[6233638]

I brought this up in the past in MC18, but it's become an issue again. I have a series of videos - 150 or so - which are supposed to be 4:3.
The problem is that the aspect ratio is not correct - it's more like 4:3.1 so the image looks too narrow, and it's encoded to a 16:9 file with bright borders on either side of the video, which are very distracting.


 
In other players this is relatively simple to fix. First, you use the horizontal stretch to fill the screen, cutting off the sides:


 
Then you enable the aspect ratio override to force the video to 4:3


 
This fixes the aspect ratio and eliminates the borders at the side of the image, giving you black bars rather than the distracting pillarboxing that was encoded into the video.
The black bars actually look more distracting on the forum, but trust me, when you're watching video full-screen on a TV, bright bars at the sides are very distracting.
 
 
Is there any possibility of this being added to Media Center?
 
There's already an aspect ratio override, but there are no independent horizontal/vertical stretch controls, only zoom, and it looks like your aspect ratio override does not crop video which was pushed off the edges of the screen.
If there was even some way to set this manually via Playback Info, that would be really helpful. As I mentioned, it's a lot of videos like this, not just one or two.

[Matt]

This is a complicated one, because you're really looking for two things:
1) Custom aspect ratio correction
2) Switching white bars to black bars

For #1, you have a 1.78 file, but you say it should be corrected by about 5% (4:3.1/4:3).  Currently there's no way to use 'Override Aspect Ratio' to enter a custom ratio.  Perhaps that would be a reasonable starting point?  I think entering it as a percent, where 100% is no correction, would make sense.

[Hendrik]

Sounds like you just need Pan&Scan to cut off the sides, which would then also need to work together with Aspect Ratio adjustments to force it back to 4:3 afterwards.

[6233638]

Sounds like you just need Pan&Scan to cut off the sides, which would then also need to work together with Aspect Ratio adjustments to force it back to 4:3 afterwards.

Exactly. In other players you just need to use the horizontal stretch to crop the sides and stretch the center image to 16:9.
Then you do a regular 16:9 > 4:3 correction.
 
I can see where a custom aspect ratio option would be useful (if you wanted to fix the center without cutting off the sides) but I don't think it would be necessary in this case.

[JimH]

I removed a feature request.  We're not taking any at this time.