Aspect Ratio on DVDs through Front Row

Question

I've been quite encouraged by FR's new acceptance of DVDs as a source (place ripped DVD movie folders into your ~movies folder or aliases to DVD folder... they appear and play in FR). I have it set up so I can browse over 600 DVDs on various remote drives along with the preview picture (place DVD cover image named preview.jpg in the DVD folder, not the VIDEO_TS folder).
It works great on my 50" Pioneer Elite hooked up to the networked MacMini, and I appear to get surround sound pass through as well.
The problem is that some DVD's I have are encoded in full screen (but in wide mode) so that the video, while actually in the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio, actually appears smaller than the screen so that there is a black border around the entire video. It plays fine, only smaller.
In DVD player, you can do Video Zoom and fill the screen but FR doesn't seem to offer this functionality. I tried changing the defaults in DVD Player, but that doesn't seem to affect FR.
Anyone know of a workaround for this? Any help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

macguyincali wrote:
I've been quite encouraged by FR's new acceptance of DVDs as a source (place ripped DVD movie folders into your ~movies folder or aliases to DVD folder... they appear and play in FR). I have it set up so I can browse over 600 DVDs on various remote drives along with the preview picture (place DVD cover image named preview.jpg in the DVD folder, not the VIDEO_TS folder).
It works great on my 50" Pioneer Elite hooked up to the networked MacMini, and I appear to get surround sound pass through as well.
The problem is that some DVD's I have are encoded in full screen (but in wide mode) so that the video, while actually in the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio, actually appears smaller than the screen so that there is a black border around the entire video. It plays fine, only smaller.
What you are describing here is 'letterboxed' widescreen. Personally I loath such DVDs and regard them as a stupid mistake by the movie studio. The correct sort of widescreen DVD is known as 'anamorphic'.
As mentioned, the Leopard DVD player now has the ability to 'zoom' the display to best fit your widescreen TV/Monitor. Unfortunately from what you say Front Row 2.0 (in Leopard) does not remember this or offer the ability to do this. In this case your only current realistic option is to see if your TV has an equivalent mode, my Sony Bravia has a button on the remote that cycles through several zoom options. If your TV has a similar option then it may be the easiest solution.
Otherwise, a less realistic option is to make your own custom DVD. I have in the past taken a letterboxed recording, cropped the image, and converted it to a proper anamorphic widescreen DVD. I used ffmpegX to do this on a Mac. In theory with a huge amount of work, one could also do this and keep the subtitles, multiple audio tracks and DVD extras but it is a huge amount of work and not all of it can be done using Mac tools, it can be done with the assistance of some free Windows tools, e.g. IfoEdit, and PGCEdit.
Note: to convert a letterboxed NTSC recording to an anamorphic NTSC DVD, one crops 60 pixels from the top, and 60 pixels from the bottom. You then re-encode it as a standard NSTC DVD resolution of 720x480 but must also tick the option that sets the anamorphic flag. I have not done this with a PAL recording, it is probable that the number of pixels needing to be cropped is different.