16x9?

[PVRUser]

Hi all,

I have pretty much finished my evaluation and only have one issue left.

I use a 17" LCD display for the monitor. However, I have not been able to use the full screen for programs that are in 16x9. The display has a setting for SVideo input that allows me do this but I can not find a way to do this in Sage. When I select 16x9 in Sage the verticle bars dissappear but the horizontal ones (the ones as part of the signal) remain. I guess I would need to zoom vertically but I am not sure how.

So any ideas how to view a 16x9 movie/show on a 16x9 monitor.

Thanks

[stanger89]

What's your display? If it 's a monitor then it's probably 16x10 not 16x9 so there will be black bars with 16x9 content.

Originally posted by PVRUser
When I select 16x9 in Sage the verticle bars dissappear but the horizontal ones (the ones as part of the signal) remain.

This confuses me a little, are you talking about 2.35:1 movies with black bars or something else?

[PVRUser]

No just regular broadcasts. For instance, I was watching Stargate SG1 and it was broadcast in 16x9. So I had the black bars on the sides like I normally would plus the black bars that are part of the broadcast on the top and bottom. Basically I had a black box around the broadcast.

When I use this monitor with S Video input I can select letterbox and it basically expands the image so it fills mostk if not all of the screen. However, if I select 16x9 in Sage the image is stretched because it removes the left/right black bars but not the top bottom.

Sorry, I hope that made more sense.

[nielm]

When a program is broadcast in 16x9 letterboxed, sage does not know this, and so the top/bottom black bars that are part of the broadcast are recorded into the mpg file as well...

+---------------+
|###############|
|               |
|               |
|               |
|               |
|###############|
+---------------+

On playback, sage still does not know about the existance of the top/bottom black bars so they are played back, and you get a 16x9 letterboxed picture... There is no way to remove these and zoom into the picture within Sage...

Some TV's and monitors are clever enough to automatically detect these black bars and zoom into themselves... Others require a manual 'zoom' setting. You need to find and switch on this setting in your LCD display.

(As an aside, An alternative broadcast format for 16x9 movies is anamorphic -- used by some sat boxes and widescreen DVDs. This mode means that the 16x9 picture is stretched vertically into a 4x3 layout -- so that there are no black bars at the top and bottom, but the pixels are no longer square... The display device (TV) needs to stretch the picture horizontally (or compress it vertically) into a 16x9 format so that the pixels have the correct proportions. This is what the aspect ratio settings do in Sage...)

[stanger89]

PVRUser,

Try adding 33% to the vertical zoom in the Force 16x9 AR Method. I played around a little and that seemed to work pretty good.

[nielm]

stanger89: nice one: I did not realise that the zoom settings can be altered differently for each aspect ratio!

[stanger89]

Yeah, I had played with the zoom settings a while ago trying to approximate the Source Relative Stretch function in ZP but couldn't get the zoom settings to work the way I thought so I gave up. This was a good excuse to play with with the AR stuff and figure out how it works.

[rhsmcc]

This brings up a problem thats going to become more common as more people change over to 16x9 format. I was wonder if there is a way to crop the image when recording to eleminate the top and bottom for shows broadcast in widescreen format? It would be nice to have a custom record setting with this ie: "Custom Widscreen 2 GB per Hr". I know that most editing software can crop video but not sure if Hauppauge 250 drivers or sage can do this?

[stanger89]

I doubt the 250 can crop video while recording, and Sage doen't do anything to the video once recorded. What would really be nice is automatic AR detection on playback. It should be possible to detect letterbox bars and automatically adjust the AR/zoom. Perhaps this could be done as a plugin for 2.0 or something.

[PVRUser]

That seemed to do the trick for me. It is not perfect but it is good. Took a bit of playing. In fact, I liked it well enough that I finally broke down and bought SageTV.

So now that I am a licensed user can I officially ask when is beta?

[JasonJoel]

You can ask.. You'll get the same answer as everyone else: after CES (jan 8-11).

Expect EVERYONE asking for a beta update on *JAN 12*. I know I will be.



Jason

Originally posted by PVRUser
That seemed to do the trick for me. It is not perfect but it is good. Took a bit of playing. In fact, I liked it well enough that I finally broke down and bought SageTV.

So now that I am a licensed user can I officially ask when is beta?