Widescreen Gaming Forum

How can i make videos i watch in windows media player permanently play in 16:10 aspect ? my screen is a Dell 2007WFP using VGA @ 1680x1050

Simply select fullscreen.

However, many videos are actually 4:3 format with black bars that are part of the video. Nothing you can do about that. If the video is in real widescreen format, WMP will automatically adapt.

Use VLC there you can choose 16:9, 16:10 and so on :)

Use VLC

Amen.

vlc is good, another good one is gomplayer.

Media Player Classic is probably the best for this as you can freely pan & scan using the number pad (as well as making your own aspect ratio presets).

I often use it to stretch/zoom 16:9 videos to fit fully on my 2007WFP.

I vote for Zoomplayer. It totally rocks and has tons of options. You can adjust custom aspect ratios on the fly.

X-Warrior is completely correct though. You are at the mercy of what aspect ratio/dimensions that the source was encoded in.

Pet peeve: When someone encodes a widescreen formatted video WITH the black letterbox borders in the video!

vlc makes baby jesus cry.

Zoomplayer on derived mode correctly matches aspect ratios unless the video is badly encoded. But if it is, you can manualy select a view mode to force the video into the correct ratio.

Pet peeve: When someone encodes a widescreen formatted video WITH the black letterbox borders in the video!

Sadly, that's actually part of the DVD specification! HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, even. It bugs me a lot that in DVD land, 2.35:1 movies are encoded as 16:9 with black bars attached. Why can't they just encode them as 2.35:1 videos and let the player generate the black bars? It's an utter waste of pixels if you ask me.

Pet peeve: When someone encodes a widescreen formatted video WITH the black letterbox borders in the video!

Sadly, that's actually part of the DVD specification! HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, even. It bugs me a lot that in DVD land, 2.35:1 movies are encoded as 16:9 with black bars attached. Why can't they just encode them as 2.35:1 videos and let the player generate the black bars? It's an utter waste of pixels if you ask me.

Not really.

The 'black' bars are actually a bit greyish. The result is that black parts of the movie appear darker. This trick improves the perceived contrast, particularly useful on LCD's ;)