Hello, I have often come across this site from everyone's best friend, Google, when looking for digital video / AV related information. In fact I think I based many purchase decisions on the advice offered in these forums. Thanks Now it's my turn to ask a question as I appear to be rather stuck! We have recently bought a Pioneer PDP-508XD (50" 1080i), and lovely it surely is. We have got a Vista box running Media Centre which is hooked into the PC input on the PDP-508XD. This all works great except for the occasional operating system crash that seems to be the accepted standard for Vista machines! The problem I have lies in actually playing back high definition video files that have been ripped from BluRay discs. Basically, our TV is wide-screen, which is 16:9 aspect ratio - right? When I play back supposedly wide-screen content ripped from BluRay, most of the time the video gets 'letter boxed'; that is, the video frame does not fit the display perfectly, and so it is proportionally scaled to fit. This leaves black lines above and below the video frame. I don't want to use the Zoom function because then the video will be cropped and the resolution will lower due to the zoom. My partner thinks I am being pedantic about this, but I find it intensely annoying being a perfectionist! VLC tells me that the video stream is 1920x900. Does this equate to 16:9, or is the problem that the person who ripped the video did it wrong? Thanks in advance...
Many wide screen movies are wider than 16/9 (1.77 AR) - such as the one you're talking about 1920/900 (2.13 AR) The only way to properly display said movies is to have the black bars top and bottom. Even if your TV had a mode to force these films to fill the whole screen, something has to give. Either it stretches the picture vertically, giving objects a tall skinny look, or it chops off the sides and zooms the remaining picture to fill the whole screen. That way, you maintain the correct AR, but lose the sides. What is the lesser evil?
