Watching movies on widescreen laptop or monitor.

[xit2nowhere]

Hello guys,
if someone watches a dvd in a widescreen format on a laptop or a computer with a widescreen, will they have any blackbars or it will be full screen ?

thank you.

 

[alpha88]

You will have some black bars, but they'll be a lot thinner.

Your screen is a 16:10 ratio (most likely)

Many movies are 16:9 (so a bit shorter, leaving 5% on top and bottom as black bars)

Some movies are even wider than that so you'll have a bit more.

 

[xit2nowhere]

Ahh, thanks alpha88.

 

[Jeff7]

Maybe the black bars could be modified in future DVDs so that they look like the edges of a TV. That way, it looks like you actually have a real widescreen TV, without any "black bars" at the top and bottom of the screen.

<---prefers widescreen and doesn't get why everyone finds two totally motionless "black bars" to be so distracting. They aren't distracting in the movie theater - then the black bars are merely places where the movie is not being projected. Same thing at home with a widescreen DVD. Oh well....rant over. For now.

 

[xit2nowhere]

Yeah, i have no problem with black bars either.

 

[Auric]

Ackshilly, contemporary films are predominantly 1.85:1 or 2.39:1.

1.78:1 (16:9) is not common for film but rather video, or film cropped for video so as to pander to hatah's of unused area on their "new fangled" TV's. This is no doubt the same crowd that loved Pan & Scan cropping and now love 1.33:1 content stretched out to fill their widescreen. Ooh, can you imagine their delight at a 2.39:1 film cropped to 1.33:1 and then stretched to fill 1.78:1! Maybe add a PIP, ticker and a station ID bug too. Woo woo! :disgust:

Personally, I don't get the queer fetish for filling a given display area just for the sake of it or even the illusion of a larger picture when the reality is cropping of the director's artistic framing, if not distortion of natural dimensions themselves. Maybe if watching a news report with any substance the images hardly matter but with film they do (or certainly should), otherwise you may as well listen to an old timey radio play.

Movie theaters actually do sometimes have the responsibility to soft matte a film so as to create a widescreen display according to the director's vision, where they actually filmed in open matte. But in any case, a screen could potentially be 20m wide but 30m high (think of a building exterior) or friggin' round for that matter. It would be rather idiotic to distort the image to fill the available space, n'est ce pas?

I feel better now that I've vented

 

[corkyg]

It also depends on your viewing software. Some of the newer ones have non-distorting zoom choices that fill in a wide screen nicely.

 

[Auric]

In this context zoom is another word for crop. Thus the reviled Pan & Scan is likewise zooming while actively trying to center on the key content; often nigh impossible of course with the classic example being two almost disembodied noses facing each other in profile while exchanging dialog. Other hellish choices in HW or SW for lower ratio content are selective stretching of portions, particularly the outer two thirds of the image, so that the dim viewer is lulled into a false perception of harmonious proportion. The Devil's work I say! :evil: Oh dear, I've gone all turgid again.

 

[Skeeedunt]

In the end it depends on the program. On my computer, setting Windows Media Player to "full screen" when playing a DVD leaves black bars around ALL edges of the screen

I agree that black bars aren't distracting, just make sure at least one dimension is maximized.

Anyway, this seems to be a decent player if you need one http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ .