Re: still no way to do custom aspect ratios?

Your best option would be to try powerstrip.

http://www.entechtaiwan.com/util/ps.shtm


The chance you'll find a solution to display all your media without bars or
overscan on a monitor that uses a 4:3 resolution on a 16:9 monitor doesn't
seem extremely promising. Support for ED HDTV ready monitors needs to be in
the video card drivers to work well.

<chimpathetic@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:79fbe92f-5a62-4595-9afb-9ea34046f7ee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I've searched and searched the web and newsgroups and it looks like
I'm SOL. I have Vista and MCE hooked up to my Pioneer 4280 TV. The
problem is that, like several other displays on the market, it's 16:9
and yet 1024x768.

I want to run it in native 1024x768 to prevent going through two
different rescales and the loss of quality. I can do this in various
media players by telling it what aspect ratio my display is. I can
even do it in Windows Media Player. Yet MCE seems to have no
understanding of this concept.

When run at 1024x768, it squishes the picture vertically, leaving
black bars on the top and bottom. The pre-set aspect ratio #3 will
made and HD signal picture fill the screen without any apparent
cropping or stretching. But on SD signals, the pictures are stretched
horizontally to fill the screen on ALL aspect ratios. So that's a
problem, but it's also a problem that I can't actually use any of the
different aspect ratio modes for their intended purpose (zooming in on
letterboxed stuff, progressive stretching of SD, etc.).

So, am I missing something, or is it really and truly just not
supported? Yes, I could run my computer at 1360x768 and let my tv
rescale it back to 1024x768. But when I do that, you can tell that
the HD signal loses some of it's eye-popping quality. It's also an
issue with some PAL mpegs I have from England. In other media
players, I have a preset aspect ratio fixer for them that I can just
engage by pressing a button. But with MCE I'm just out of luck.

I'm going to have to ditch Media Center if this issue cannot be
solved. And that's a shame because I think it is otherwise very cool
software and was a selling point for the PC I bought.

I'm actually fairly resigned that I'm going to have to do that. But I
guess if there was some place to complain where someone from Microsoft
would actually see this, it might help. Probably not, but who knows.
The sad part is that Windows Media Player supports changing the aspect
ratio to a custom setting!

Any help is appreciated.

--
Jason


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