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Best way to change 4:3 to 16:9

K

kolax

macrumors G3
Original poster
Mar 20, 2007
9,181
115
I have a 37" LCD TV which I connect my MBP to and use Front Row to access all my TV shows and films. However, practically all my TV Shows (South Park, American Dad, Friends etc) are 4:3 ratio. This is an annoyance since my TV is 16:9, so it isn't taking advantage of the full screen.

I know the image will be stretched and things look slightly fat but looks perfectly acceptable if I change the resolution of the TV from 1360x768 to 1024x768. Right now, that is the only way I can get my TV shows to fill the screen when using Front Row.

But now, I'm thinking it would be a lot easier if everything I had played in a 16:9 ratio to save me changing the resolution depending on what we are watching (defeats the purpose of Front Row).

What is the best way to go about doing this? Is there a way to tell Front Row/QuickTime to make all 4:3 videos 16:9? Or do I have to re-encode them all to 16:9? If so, what software does that?

Cheers,
 
My TV won't change it because it is a 16:9 signal that is being fed to it. VLC player won't do since the idea is to use Front Row.

Can I drag a whole selection of videos into HandBrake and get it to change the aspect ratio or do I have to do it one by one? I have over 300 videos that I want adjusted.

Cheers.
 
Bah, things are in so many resolutions out there.

4:3 looks awful stretched to 16:9.

Maybe you could just learn to like it?

Not many films are 16:9 either.

A lot of old films are in 4:3 and lots of films are in 2.35:1 to name just 2 non 16:9 resolutions. These all need bars on a 16:9 TV or they look terrible.

It always struck me as odd thet when watching a medium that is all about visuals that people want to distort things and make them fill a shape they wre not meant to just because they want to use the whole area of there TV.

Do you also stretch every application windows so it fills the entire screen?

Do you always fill your car to capacity or get someone to stretch out on the back seat to make up?

Yeah these things sounds ridiculous. So is stretching 4:3 to 16:9.
 
Stretching a 4:3 to 16:9 is like getting someone to stretch on the back seat of my car? What have you been smoking? It is perfectly acceptable for me to want to stretch 16:9 to 4:3 to fill my TV screen. It makes whatever I'm watching bigger. If you don't have any advice on what I want to do and want to just criticise then don't post here, k?

And when I stretch the image to 16:9 the image doesn't get distorted, looks perfect.
 
You don't find that everyone looks like Stewie Griffin?

StewieGriffin2%20400w.gif
 
Kilamite said:
Stretching a 4:3 to 16:9 is like getting someone to stretch on the back seat of my car? What have you been smoking? It is perfectly acceptable for me to want to stretch 16:9 to 4:3 to fill my TV screen. It makes whatever I'm watching bigger. If you don't have any advice on what I want to do and want to just criticise then don't post here, k?

And when I stretch the image to 16:9 the image doesn't get distorted, looks perfect.
Click to expand...

So your the one that likes that, huh? lol

Seriously, a lot of people must want it since tv's have the option to do it for you. Personally, I can't imagine watching something stretched. It annoys me beyond reason.
 
Certain things look stupid stretched I agree - but some of the TV Shows I have look fine and a lot better stretched.
 
I think that I have done this with FFMPegX. You can reshape, resize and do all things that are good. But that was 2 years ago.
 
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