getting widescreen movies to fill my widescreen monitor

[MaxPlanck]

I have a widescreen monitor with a native reslution of 1440 x 900...how can I get my xvid/divx/x264/DVD movies to play so that they will fill the screen?

[foxyshadis]

You have to expand 16:9 movies to 16:10. (God knows why monitor makers chose that ratio.) You can crop the sides, resize for a small aspect ratio error, or both. You can do that with ffdshow: the easiest way is resize, where you just specify a 16:10 aspect ratio and it does the calculations. Too bad it doesn't have a warped-resize. Another way is to just set your monitor to a real 16:9 resolution, if it has one.

For wider (1.83 and 2.33) movies, you probably don't want to force them, but you can crop if you really need to.

[CWR03]

I have a widescreen monitor with a native reslution of 1440 x 900...how can I get my xvid/divx/x264/DVD movies to play so that they will fill the screen?
Your choices are to crop the top and bottom or the sides of the video to make it fit (which will lose some of the video) or stretch it either vertically or horizontally (which will mess up how things look). Or you could just have some black borders and not make a big deal out of it not completely filling the screen.

[Inventive Software]

One solution is the following. Bear with me.

Media Player Classic does this via it's "Video Frame >> Touch the window from inside" option when you right-click the main window. If you want it to keep an aspect ratio of 16:9 on the video, you change the aspect ratio in "Override Aspect Ratio >> 16:9", but this might not be necessary. :)

[Awatef]

not make a big deal out of it not completely filling the screen

Very good idea! All other options are unacceptable, at least for me...

[MaxPlanck]

Very good idea! All other options are unacceptable, at least for me...

agreed...I'm finicky about the aspect ratio being messed with. I'll stick with the black bars, thanks guys.