VisualHubbing Old Shows For Widescreen?

[supercooled]

Hi, I'm a fan of old tv shows that come in 4:3 and using VisualHub's latest version on their AppleTV 2.0 setting doesn't seem to have the desired effects. I'm getting 2 black bars (letter box effect?) on my conversions. I tried (admittedly not as hard) looking in the advanced settings but did not or could not figure out how to make it stretch to 16:9.

Thanks in advance

 

[spice weasel]

I don't use VisualHub, but you are probably getting pillar-boxing (black bands on the side). If you stretch a 4:3 movie into a 16:9 one, you are going to get distortion. If this doesn't bother you, then I would recommend just using your television to do the stretching. That way you keep the original encode in 4:3. Most tv's have a variety of settings useful for stretching a 4:3 image across a widescreen panel, and they do it so that the distortion is less noticeable than it would be if you encoded it that way.

 

[supercooled]

I don't use VisualHub, but you are probably getting pillar-boxing (black bands on the side). If you stretch a 4:3 movie into a 16:9 one, you are going to get distortion. If this doesn't bother you, then I would recommend just using your television to do the stretching. That way you keep the original encode in 4:3. Most tv's have a variety of settings useful for stretching a 4:3 image across a widescreen panel, and they do it so that the distortion is less noticeable than it would be if you encoded it that way.

Thanks for the reply.

I have used the native stretching tool on my television but I recall VisualHub also having a setting to accomplish this which, for intents and purposes would be a better all around solution for me. It doesn't merely stretch, it crops out a bit of the perspective and fills the screen in a similar way iPhoto does with slideshow.

 

[Darth.Titan]

Click 'Advanced' in VH and there you can maually set the height and width of the output file. Try 960x540.