MBP Screen Resolution, Aspect Ratios & Movies

[lPHONE]

To me this does not make any sense:

# Supported resolutions: 1440 by 900 (native), 1280 by 800, 1152 by 720, 1024 by 640, and 800 by 500 pixels at 16:10 aspect ratio; 1024 by 768, 800 by 600, and 640 by 480 pixels at 4:3 aspect ratio; 1024 by 768, 800 by 600, and 640 by 480 pixels at 4:3 aspect ratio stretched; 720 by 480 pixels at 3:2 aspect ratio; 720 by 480 pixels at 3:2 aspect ratio stretched

No sense what so ever...

That said, if I want to watch movies in the highest possible resolution and have it fill up the screen completely (no letterbox), what screen resolution do I use and what ratiodo I buy my DVD's in? A friend recommended 3:2?

 

[fs454]

If you have your DVD fill up the whole screen with no letterbox you're losing a ton of what's meant to be there.




DVDs come in widescreen or fullscreen. Fullscreen cuts a crap-ton of the frame out and zooms it in to fill a 4:3 (non-HD television size) screen. Widescreen gives you all of the frame as it was intended.


Supported resolutions has not much to do with what you're asking though. Your 15" MBP will run at 1440x900 (as that's how many physical pixels it has, run it at any less and it'll be blurrier), which has an aspect ratio of 16:10.

If you buy "Fullscreen" DVDs you're gonna have a square image with black bars on the sides. Widescreen will be shorter than your display and have letterboxes on the top and bottom, but you can zoom to fit I suppose.

 

[fenman]

To me this does not make any sense:



No sense what so ever...

That said, if I want to watch movies in the highest possible resolution and have it fill up the screen completely (no letterbox), what screen resolution do I use and what ratiodo I buy my DVD's in? A friend recommended 3:2?

Apple website lists all the resolutiosn that an MBP supports, but they are not all native. Native means the number of physical pixels in the panel and the aspect ratio of height to width of the display. Those for the MBP 15" are 1440x900 and 16:10. Any other resolution the system is capable of displaying will either mean that more than one physical pixel is used to display a logical pixel (if aspect ratio is still 16:10, e.g 1280x800), or that black bands will appear if the aspect ratio is different. Or a combination of both.

The aspect ratio of movies depends on what they shot as. If a film is converted to another aspect ratio, it will either lose some of the picture or the picture will get distorted. The highest mainstream resolution is Full HD 1920x1080 16:9 which MBP 15" will be able to play downscaled to 1440x900 without distortion but with black bands at top and bottom of 1/20th of screen height each. Some movies are shot in wider aspect ratios such as 21:9 and will have larger black bands.

 

[lPHONE]

Maybe in the future Blue-Ray's or whatever will have size for all screens and automatically picks the best one. But that won't be for a while... Probably not until the year 2000.

 

[kny3twalker]

Maybe in the future Blue-Ray's or whatever will have size for all screens and automatically picks the best one. But that won't be for a while... Probably not until the year 2000.

all you are suggesting is that the player zooms the movie in so you do not have black bars.

Forget that you lose some of the picture on the sides.