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Convert videos from widescreen to full screen

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emtwolf

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I am new to the forum and I am trying to figure out a way to "reconvert" already ripped movies from widescreen to full screen. Someone who asked me to convert a few movies for them is complaining the picture is too small because of the widescreen aspect.
Any ideas? I'm at a loss and tired of searching the past forums.
Thanks for your help.
 

bizzyjb

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Unless he wants to watch a video that is a little bit larger, but stretched out...I wouldn't bother.

It's widescreen for a reason, if you change the aspect ratio from 16:9 or 2.35:1 (whichever widescreen ratio it is) to 4:3 (which is full screen), it's going to look like total ###.

Is he trying to watch this video on an ipod? Or on a PC?
 

dvdcatalyst

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The process you are talking about is called cropping.

Widescreen movies on an ipod (as well as on non-widescreen TV's) show black borders on top and bottom. To make the movie fullscreen, parts of the side of the movie need to be cut off (cropped).
Most ipods have a zoom function which will zoom in to the full height of the movie rather than to adjust it to fit. This also cuts off the sides of the movie.

Cropping will keep the aspect ratio, but you loose some of the actual movie. In the past, movies have been made with this in mind (for tv viewing), and all the action is usually in the center area of the screen, but more recent movies are more made for wide-screen viewing.

DVD movies themselves have the black borders hardcoded in the movie, and not all DVD or video converters can remove these easily (if you play the movie on a computer, you will see if the black bars are hardcoded). When you watch a movie with hardcoded black borders on an ipod, the zoom will not work properly, because the black bars are part of the movie file.

There are a few converters (dvd catalyst is one of them) that can automatically detect and remove black borders.
 

studogvetmed

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dvdcatalyst said:
DVD movies themselves have the black borders hardcoded in the movie, and not all DVD or video converters can remove these easily (if you play the movie on a computer, you will see if the black bars are hardcoded). When you watch a movie with hardcoded black borders on an ipod, the zoom will not work properly, because the black bars are part of the movie file.
Most modern and recently released DVDs no longer have the black bars hard coded or "letterboxed" into the move itself. This is mostly a call back to the day of VHS. Though you will find some DVDs that do this today, most are in "anamorphic" wide screen or simply the original aspect ratio and do not hard code the bars in.

To the OP,
I'm not sure about cropping down an already converted file. But most converters do provide a cropping option, but is best applied at the time of conversion.

As has been suggested, ask the person who is looking at the movies to go into the video settings and turn widescreen off and see how viewing the movies look, if acceptable, move on and make sure to crop all further conversions prior to ripping, if not, you may be looking at reconverting from source.

handbrake offers some nice cropping options. I am unfamiliar with other options, but there are many, especially on windows side.

iLounge wrote up an excellent review on video formats and goes into the "letterboxing" and aspect ration discussion: Good read

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/the-complete-guide-to-ipod-video-formats-and-display-resolutions/
 
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