iTunes Movie Playback - widescreen bands

AlanD

Hi,

when playing back a movie in iTunes and after selecting to view the movie in full screen, my macbook plays the movie with 2 large black bands top and bottom, making the picture size pretty small. So when this gets displayed on my TV, only have the tv is taken up with picture.

How can I play back a movie from iTunes and have no widescreen black bands? Is it possible?

A

Sad Professor

What films? Are they "scope"/2.35:1 films? If so that's the correct aspect ratio and you shouldn't want to watch them any other way. But if you insist on cropping the sides off there's an option in the view menu to "fill screen" while in Quicktime's fullscreen mode (i'm not sure about iTunes). VLC can do this as well.

AlanD

what films?

iTunes movie rentals.....

so they playback through iTunes

Sad Professor

I've no experience with iTunes rentals but maybe if you find the original file they'll play in Quicktime... probably not though. There doesn't appear to be any way to crop in iTunes.

Do you have an Appletv as well?

Dont be at yourself

Are you playing them back on a widescreen TV? If so, there's probably an option on your TV to adjust the aspect ratio - look for a 'zoom' setting.

AlanD

I must try zoom.

No don't have an Apple TV, but just use my MacBook and display it on the tv. It's only an old Sony CRT, but picture quality of the HD downloads from Apple is pretty good actually. Apart from the widescreen bands.....

Thing is, playback on the macbook itself has these big widescreen bands too. So what's on the tv is exactly what is on the MacBook.

Breezer

AlanD wrote: »

Thing is, playback on the macbook itself has these big widescreen bands too. So what's on the tv is exactly what is on the MacBook.

That's because the MacBook's screen is 16:10. Widescreen TVs are 16:9, and movies are often recorded in wider ratios again to fit a cinema screen. I usually resize my movies with Handbrake when I'm ripping them from DVD but obviously this isn't possible in the case of iTunes rentals.

I don't have any iTunes rentals myself, but I tried this just now with a music video bought off iTunes and it worked: drag and drop the file from iTunes to the desktop, and then as Sad Professor said, open it with Quicktime. When you go to fullscreen in Quicktime there's an option to zoom to fit the screen. You'll lose a little bit of the picture from the sides though.

AlanD

Great info! Thanks for all of that. I'll give it a go the next time I rent.

It's a pity iTunes doesn't have the same options as Quicktime, since it probably uses the same playback engines.

Anyway, I'll give it a go. Thanks again.