weird 16:9 ratio in hdtv movie

[torstn]

hi
i got a 1080i movie here but the black bars are too big they take most of the screen so ppl in the movie look fat- uknow what i mean. in fact there are two different black bars. first one is a lighter dark and the big bars are a deep black.

here is how it looks

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the middle 1/3 of the screen is the actual movie

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[Blue_MiSfit]

sounds like a seriously bad rip.

If you want to watch it cleanly, setup ffdshow to crop off the bars, and resize to whatever you feel the correct aspect ratio is.

Or re-encode it.

~MiSfit

[torstn]

sounds good
problem is the ffmpg only works for windows media player and those are ts files that can only played with VLC player and this player don't use the encoding decoding from ffmpg as far as i know / experienced. maybe anyone knows how to change that ... ?
also as far as i know ffmpg can't play any files itself right ? its only for encoding and decoding?


if i use hdtvtompeg2 i keep getting a black screen in the mpg output files so that dont work either.

[Darksoul71]

If you can live with re-encoding this, you could do this:
- Open the file in AVIDemux
- Crop away all black bars
- Choose your target width (e.g. 1920 for 1080 movies)
- Find out the true aspect ratio of the movie somewhere in the www. I am taking Oblivion here as example (http://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Oblivion-Blu-ray/63492/).
Now lets say the orginal aspect ratio of your movie was 2.39:1 and you aim for a width of1920. To get the target height we simply devide 1920 through 2.39 and get something around 803. Depending on your playback device I would always (!) use resolutions which are deviable by multiples of 4 (e.g. 4 / 8 / 16). I would aim for 16 and thus use a target res of 1920x800.
- So we resize to 1920x800 (quite common for BD stuff) and encode with the codec of your choice.

I hope you get the picture. For non-square pixels (e.g. DVD target) things get more complicated....

[raffriff42]

If you are using VLC Player, right click, "video"
Experiment with "aspect ratio" or "crop"

[hello_hello]

hi
i got a 1080i movie here but the black bars are too big they take most of the screen so ppl in the movie look fat- uknow what i mean. in fact there are two different black bars. first one is a lighter dark and the big bars are a deep black.

Aspect ratio issues aside, it sounds like you might be viewing video using incorrect luminance levels. Does the video look the same when viewing it using a standalone player or are the black bars totally black? Maybe you're seeing a combination of black bars encoded with the video which actually look dark grey (because the luminance levels are wrong), while the extra black borders being added by the player appear black as they should.

My best guess.... the movie has probably been encoded with the black bars and the aspect ratio should be 16:9 so between then they fill the screen, but for some reason it's been set to display using a wider aspect ratio (incorrectly). Therefore the player is adding some additional black in order to fill the 16:9 screen.
Or to put it another way, the video should have a 16:9 aspect ratio but it's been incorrectly set to something wider.

Open the video with MediaInfo and have a look to see what it says the aspect ratio is. Or to view it more accurately, open the video with MPC-HC and see what it says under File/Properties.
If the aspect ratio isn't 16:9, then opening the video with MKVMergeGUI and resaving it while setting the aspect ratio to 16:9 might fix it (MKVMergeGUI is pretty simple to use if you don't mind MKV). Or tsmuxer should let you change the aspect ratio (I assume?) when remuxing ts files.

The above is an educated guess.... not necessarily correct..... ;)