Just to make things easier... Which codecs do you recommend me to use in order to get the best result? More easier... which codecs/configutarion are you using at My movies and my dvd actually? ;-) If I copy your configuration, i'm sure to get the best result... I want to get succeed on this!!!
OK, it seems to be great! I,ve found some troubles working with the cropping plug in of MP, but i hope to find the better way to work both oh them at the same time... ¿is it possible?
EDIT: well what do you know. I was fiddling with the crop settings for the capture cards and the black bars are gone now. Image quality is aweful but I'll have to live with it.
Hello Lars,
appreciate the effort you're putting into this. Open source communities need people like you.
I have analog TV and the problem for me is that in Mediaportal there is no strech mode that will produce full screen video for the channels that broadcast in fake 16:9. Zoom leaves relatively small black bars on top and bottom.
I have a widescreen LCD monitor(1680x1050)and an old CRT widescreen TV (I think it is 720x576, but stretched).
Here in the Netherlands Widescreen broadcasts are sent via PAL, so they are sent with very large black bars at the top and bottom (I believe this is called non-anamorphic). The TV stations can send out a signal that lets the TV know that it's dealing with a widescreen broadcast. So it then automatically scales the image so it fits the screen.
I've tried different resolutions both on my LCD and CRT but the black bars remain. Lowering the vertical resolution to 540px instead of 576 increased the size of the black bars. Problem is that I can't increase the vertical resolution while staying at horizontal 720px(720x540 is NTSC I think, and I don't have an NTSC TV).
Could it be that there is a special stretch mode in my TV that copes with the widescreen signal. Could it be that the signal TV stations send isn't actually 16:9 but 16:10 and MP has a stretch for 16:9? It's quite hard to see if the image is squashed when I watch TV with MP because the difference will not be huge to the untrained (my) eye.
There is not a real solution for me. I could adjust the zoom of the TV, but then I'd lose part of the mediaportal interface, and it just bothers me that I can't get it the way it's supposed to be. I can also adjust the overscan of the video out, but this also makes the MP interface go over the edges.
Any thoughts on this? Forgive me if this has been asked before. I've read large parts of the thread, but may have missed something.
For your detection rule of 4:3 you use 768 width. Does this mean that for the plugin to work I have to set my capture cards to use 768x576 pixels, instead of the real PAL 720x576px? I can see that the image for 4:3 isn't exactly 100% the size of the square the videocard outputs, so would this be a problem?
I haven't installed Powerdvd 7.3 yet, but I did install ATi's AVIVO software which also has an MPEG decoder. The weird thing though is that I get a blank screen while I hear the audio when I use this decoder.
There is also an ATI Mpeg Multiplexer and an ATI CC (Closed captions = teletext???) Multiplexer.
Maybe someone else with integrated graphics from ATI can comment on this?
Still, the question remains what settings should I use for fake 16:9 broadcasts to detect the black bars?