I have a couple movies that I've ripped and they are 4:3 and when I play them on Apple TV there are black bars on both sides. Is there any way to make movies stretch to fit the entire screen?
If the source material was 4:3, then you're going to get the black bars. Most widescreen televisions will allow you to stretch and zoom to get rid of the bars, but then you are either going to distort the picture horizontally or end up cutting off portions of the top and bottom of the frame.
There’s no built-in “stretch-o-vision” feature in the Apple TV, and you should just say no to 4:3 stretching to fill a 16:9 screen. It completely distorts the picture.
If you’re that desperate, just pick up the widescreen version of the movie used at your local video store or Amazon for cheap.
If you really want your 4:3 material to display in 16:9 then encode it with Handbrake and set a custom pixel aspect ratio of 64:45 for PAL or 40:33 for NTSC (I could be wrong about the NTSC pixel aspect ratio as I'm from a PAL country).
Weird...I have three options: Normal, Stretch and Fill on my Westinghouse 42" HDTV...normal is the 4:3 as you see, the Stretch makes it fill the whole 16x9 space while keeping the height the same, and the fill essentially zooms into the center of the picture until there is enough horizontal imagery to fill the screen, cutting off the top and bottom of the image.
It also worked the same way with the digital converter box I used about 5 years ago with my standard def TV.
Yep, it's strange, I've got Just Scan which is a 1:1 pixel mapping mode, Zoom which zooms into the center of the image but still doesn't fit the horizonal width of the screen and Wide Zoom which is like Zoom but only zooms the width but still doesn't fill the width of the screen. Luckly I like my 4:3 material to be 4:3 so it makes no difference to me
The PSIZE button just cycles through the same option I listed.
What I have noticed is that in the Samsung menus I have two different places where I can change the picture size one is called SIZE and gives the following options:-
Auto Wide (this is unselectable when using HDMI as an input)
16:9
Wide Zoom
Zoom
4:3
Just Scan
The other is called Screen Mode and contains the following options:-
16:9
Wide Zoom
Wide
4:3
Now all the option under Screen Mode are grayed out unless the first set of options ie. SIZE is set to Auto Wide which you can't set when using HDMI.
Hmmmm.... Very strange. Don't know why they need two different sets of sizing options........
Yep, I think your right. Even through I don't use the feature it got me interested and I did some testing. It seems the zoom function works ok for the SD scart inputs but not for the HD inputs ie. HDMI. I'd still love to know why Samsung feel the need to give me two sets of picture size controls?