Best AR for 4:3 SDTV on a 16:9 RPTV?

[NodeSpyder]

I've done some thread searching but haven't been able to find anything that talks about this. Heck, I figured it would have been mentioned in the Sage FAQ, but I didn't see it there either.

I was wondering what settings people were using to view 4:3 SDTV (either live or recorded) through SageTV on their 16:9 RPTV's that utilize the most screen realestate?

Since SageTV doens't have a non-linear stretch feature, I figured that you had to modify the FILL settings to stretch the picture manually to get the best fit. So far, this is what I've come up with:

Horizontal Stretch: 95%

Vertical Stretch: 120%

This seems to do a good job of using most of the screen horizontally and keeping the picture in nice aspect ratio. Of course, you do loose some picture at the top and bottom of the screen due to the vertical strecthing.

Now, in another thread I saw here, someone mentioned FFDShow had a warp stretch feature. I've seen this option, but I have not been able to get it to work. Has anyone played around with this? Could you use this feature and some vertical stretching to get the same effect as most 16:9 RPTV's built in 4:3 Stretch Modes? This would be really nice to get working. I don't know about everyone else, but I like to use as much of my screen as possible and I try to avoid black bars as much as possible.

Thanks for any help or tips anyone can provide.

[mwhite]

I believe what you need is a program called Powerstrip that is designed to do change resolutions to better match your display.

More information on PowerStrip

HTH

-mark

[NodeSpyder]

Thanks for the reply Mark. I forgot to mention in my original post that I'm already running Powerstrip. I'm running v3.47 using a DVI cable between my RPTV and video card. I currently have it setup for a 856x480 resolution (I've read Karnis' posts over at AVSforums multiple times). I have a little underscan all around the video but I'm ignoring that at this stage of the game.

I'm just trying to find the best settings within SageTV to fit 4:3 video on as much of the 16:9 screen as possible.

[stanger89]

With ffdshow there are 2 ways I'm aware of to do a non-linear stretch:

Warped Resize which is ver CPU intensive - you need to set Horizontal Warp to < 1 IIRC.
Dscaler linear correction filter, set it to Non-linear Stretch

That's for fullscreen content,

For letterbox content setting the 16x9 AR to about 130% vertical zoom pretty effectively chops the bars off.