Aspect Ratio
Posted on: Sun, 04/13/2008 - 15:52
Aspect Ratio
My screen has an aspect ratio of 16:10, and most videos I open in full screen with DivX have black lines down the side, unless I right click, click custom aspect and type in 16 and 10.
It's annoying to have to do this all the time, and it doesn't work unless I exit fullscreen mode, then change the ratio, then go back into it, so is there any way to set a default aspect ratio?
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Dauntless,
Believe it or not having the black bars there is a good thing! The reason that it happens is that your desktop resolution may not match the display aspect of the files you are playing exactly. In order to preserve the correct aspect ratio of the video DivX Player will add letterboxing or pillarboxing so that the picture is not stretched or squashed. Although you can force a different aspect to fill the screen what you're actually doing is stretching the picture slightly - i.e. objects/people in the scenes will appear slightly taller or wider than they ought to be.
If you're stretching to 16:10 from 16:9 that may not look too bad, but if DivX Player always persisted the setting then when you played other content that was for example in a 4:3 frame you could end up with a very distorted picture. The same technique is used by DVD players to make sure that content with a wide range of aspect ratios will correctly display on your TV, be it a standard or widescreen set.
So the borders are there to make the movie display correctly. Hopefully now you understand that it is less annoying!
My monitor is also 16:10 and I have a 16:9 video that is getting black borders on the left and right and streching the content to 16:10, thereby displaying an incorrect aspect ratio.
Practically every movie will have some black border... either T&B or L&R.
It's all good.
.
G,B&U
Pascal
Are those videos 4:3?