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Garrettc87

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 4, 2006
27
5
Lately I have been playing my widescreen movies in front row on my imac but it leaves bars on the bottom and top of the screen, is there any way to adjust frontrow to stretch the movies? Also Quicktime Pro, in widescreen mode will i still get the bars or will it stretch to fit screen, thanks!
 
say the name of this thread 5 times fast :p .
anyway no there isnt an easy way or a built in way with front row. the hard way would be to rencode your videos to crop and or distort them. (not fun)
 
Easiest thing to do is use Niceplayer's resizing from the center, which would preserve the aspect ratio but crop some pixels, or aspect ratio stretching (it's 16:10 for most Apple laptops, if I'm not mistaken). VLC can force a different aspect ratio as well, and is the only option I know of that you won't have to enable individually for each movie you play (though you'd probably want to disable it for 4:3 movies.)

If you want to not have black bars in QuickTime Pro or Frontrow, you have two options. First, you can change the scaled size of the video track to one with the same aspect ratio as your screen. Second, you can add a rectangular mask to crop the video track to aspect ratio you want. Either way, you'd need to save the changed movie as a QuickTime movie, reference if you still want to keep the original file, and open that one in Frontrow. It's better than reencoding, since there's no quality loss, but still not too fun.

The easiest thing would be to just accept the bars you get when playing a 16:9 movie on a 16:10 screen.
 
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