Grey Bars (maybe this has been asked before)

[Lee Christie]

Sorry if this has been asked before, I did search, don't yell at me.

I know that due to the lots of different aspect ratios, black bars are going to show up. I can live with that, but here's what i don't understand, maybe someone can explain it to me.

I draw a picture:



I'm NOT asking why the number of lines in the encoded video isn't the same as my screen. I'm NOT asking why the number of lines in the picture isn't the same as my screen.

I'm asking about those grey bars. If the movie is a certain ratio, why not encode a video at that ratio on to the disc, why add extra lines and color them NEARLY-but-not-quite-black. It seems to be that if you by some coincidence had a screen (or more likely a resizable PowerDVD window) the same ratio as the movie picture, you'd be forced to endure grey bars and the top and bottom, plus black bars at the left and right (for not matching the video ratio)

Is there any reason they add the extra grey lines?

And is there any reason they don't at least make them pure RGB(0, 0, 0) so they blend in with the actual black bars?


EDIT: okay just before you guys rip on me for complaining about something minor, i'd like to mention there are two reasons i don't like them:

1. The black bars are the same color as my monitor, so it don't notice those, but the grey ones are more noticable.

2. If I feal lke stretching the video to fullscreen (which I do when the aspect ratio is similar enough that it wont look distorted) - that makes the black bars go away but the grey bars stay because as far as the software and hardware know, those grey bars might be something i want to look as (after all someone went ot the bother of encoding them in to the disc didn't they) - so i don't know how to make PowerDVD (for example) strech further beyond that so that the grey bars go away too.

I noticed these all the time on DVD i thought they'd go away when the invented a new type of medium (be it Blu-ray or whatever else)

Please don't flame me, it hurts.

[BStecke]

I'm gonna be the first to say wtf?! I've never seen or heard anything about what you're talking about. Is this only on a laptop or something? Am I the only one scratching their head on this?

[Aaron]

Bizzare...

[Lee Christie]

Originally Posted by BStecke

I'm gonna be the first to say wtf?! I've never seen or heard anything about what you're talking about. Is this only on a laptop or something? Am I the only one scratching their head on this?

I might be exagerating when i sey grey-bars. they're more off-black. I'm just saying grey to distinguish between the real black bars and these ones.

[Zaphod]

Never heard of this problem before...

[Lee Christie]

You are meking me think I'm crazy...

Alright enough of my stupid doodles, i've taken a proper screenshot. Now i had to fuss with this because the video pic wouldnt show up on the screenshot so i screenshotted it then seperately captured the pic and pasted it togethor, but that's irrelivant because the result is what i saw on the screen, except for the red box i added.

• The window is streched to a very wide ratio to show the effect more clearly.
• powerDVD is scaling the image to as large as it can while maintaining the ratio (it belives that the grey bars - as i am calling them - are part of the picture) i have drawn a red box around what it thinks is the image.
• In this movie the grey bars as i called them are actually black-black which isn't so bad, but you can still see the effect im talking about
• The bars at the left and right are a product of the shape of the window
• The bars at the top and bottom are part of the DVD, and are the effect i'm talking about

[Aaron]

Originally Posted by Lee Christie

You are meking me think I'm crazy...

Alright enough of my stupid doodles, i've taken a proper screenshot. Now i had to fuss with this because the video pic wouldnt show up on the screenshot so i screenshotted it then seperately captured the pic and pasted it togethor, but that's irrelivant because the result is what i saw on the screen, except for the red box i added.

The window is streched to a very wide ratio to show the effect more clearly.

<pic removed>

• powerDVD is scaling the image to as large as it can while maintaining the ratio (it belives that the grey bars - as i am calling them - are part of the picture) i have drawn a red box around what it thinks is the image.
• In this movie the grey bars as i called them are actually black-black which isn't so bad, but you can still see the effect im talking about
• The bars at the left and right are a product of the shape of the window
• The bars at the top and bottom are part of the DVD, and are the effect i'm talking about

Most widescreen movies have black bars on the top and bottom, see the sicky somewhere around here.

[jorg]

oka i know about this the problem happens your your watching a movie made for 16:9 on a 4:30 screen i think when the disc is encoded it includs this then when your tv displays it it shows it as the proper ascpect ration and not sctreched

instead of b;lack there grey

[Lee Christie]

okay so does anyone know why they don't just encode the video file with an identical aspect ratio to the film - whatever it may be. The only excuse i can think of it that a specific encoding algorithm may restrict the resolutions you can use (limits you to specific set of aspect ratios), but i don't know if that is true or not for DVD/Blu-ray?

[Aaron]

I haven't been this confused in a long time. Your not making any sense. (Sorry if that sounds harsh)

[jorg]

well could u tell use what movie/movies your talking about???lmao

and what about all those movies that were reformated to 4:3 to fit poeples tvs

[Lee Christie]

It's probably not your fault guys. I'm really bad at communicating.

Aaron, are you still confused after looking at my screenshot?

jorg, i'm talking about, probably most of the DVDs i own - screenshot was from The Matrix as it was the firts one I picked out of the shelf. And you're thinking about anamorphic wiescreen, that's probably unrelated. Or is it? I dunno. Maybe you're on to something. but wait I'm 90% sure I remember seeing the same problem on Blu-ray and it DOESN'T use anamorphic widescreen. Does it?

[jorg]

o i see what u mean maybe lmao im bad at comunicating to lmao no worries,
so i think this is how it is happning i know there 3 assepct ration there something like full screen 4:3
then something like then the middle one
then the thinnest one and i think the thnnest one is like 18: to somthing or what not but wit u your pic i think they added the greay for the orginly 18: somthing formated movie so it would be the thiicker one i think it like 2.4 or somthing and they mite of done that so that it would on all tv be shown in its original accept ration and not stretched to the slitly larger one?

[WriteSimply]

NTSC color space is different from RGB/Computer color space. What is good enough for NTSC black is not black enough for RGB, which is what you're referring to.

PLUS, calibrate your monitor to match both RGB and NTSC color space as best as you can. That will eliminate the grey/off-black.


fuad

[WickyWoo]

Simply's got it nailed

[Deciazulado]

As I've been saying forever , digital video is from levels 16-235 and those have to be remapped to 16-> Total 0% Black level 0, and 235-> Max 100% White level 255

Your computer levels go from 0-255. The video raw has the black at level 16 and the white at level 235. On top of that, you could also probably have your monitor's (the actual electrical level on the display) black level set a little too high, just as 90% of the people seem to have it when I go calibrate their monitors (meaning that even level 0 is not true BLACK.) On my displays 16 is BLACK.
Just adjust your PowerDVDs controls (or calibrate your monitor, or set the PS3 RGB to Full, etc) till the "dark grey" black letterbox bars look like total black and the white square on a color bar is as white as it can get (if you can measure with an eye-dropper tool, better still, 0% level 0, and 100% level 255) In fact on most LCDs following a true 2.2 or higher gamma tone curve the PLUGE bar would also end up looking BLACK

[Lee Christie]

I guess I need to figure out gamma then.

Still, what If you want to strech the movie to your entire screen size, is there any way to do that? Since the dark grey bars are part of the picture, if you tell PowerDVD to strech the image, it will strech it such that the black bars are gone, but the dark grey bars are still faithfully displayed. Okay so i guess you wouldn't want to do this on a movie with a very wide aspect ratio since streching it all that way would make it look distorted, but if the aspect ratio were similar to your screen, but not quite there youmight want to.

[WickyWoo]

You need to run a calibration program, that will help eliminate them as much as possible. There are all kinds of adjustment sliders in PowerDVD

[Deciazulado]

Originally Posted by Lee Christie

I guess I need to figure out gamma then.

Still, what If you want to strech the movie to your entire screen size, is there any way to do that? Since the dark grey bars are part of the picture, if you tell PowerDVD to strech the image, it will strech it such that the black bars are gone, but the dark grey bars are still faithfully displayed. Okay so i guess you wouldn't want to do this on a movie with a very wide aspect ratio since streching it all that way would make it look distorted, but if the aspect ratio were similar to your screen, but not quite there youmight want to.

There are no dark grey bars in the picture. They are black. It's your software and/or monitor that is not adjusted properly to show them as black. The black area on the compurter around the DVD/BD/video picture is RGB 0,0,0. The black areas in digital video are natively RGB 16,16,16. You need to adjust the digital video so the RGB 16,16,16 shows up as black (0,0,0) on your screen (by adjusting your video playback software and/or your hardware player, and/or your monitor ) I know it's a little bit complicated to conceptualize, specially if you have no way of measuring the video levels. But it's as WriteSimply simply said: NTSC IRE and digital video levels and computer levels all have slightly different parameters that need to be calibrated or "normalized" to look equal.

Originally Posted by Lee Christie

Still, what If you want to strech the movie to your entire screen size, is there any way to do that?

A program like VLC is more flexible for doing that but I don't know if there's a version that plays HD discs. What you'd want is for the program to strecth the video signal AND crop the black bars out but if you have a 4:3 monitor that would make Scope movies look squished 2:1.

The other way to do it is just to zoom in (if the program permits) cropping the image's sides like in the pan/scan VHS era to fill the screen without distorting the actors. But then you'd loose up to half the picture if you have a 4:3 monitor.

[Lee Christie]

Originally Posted by Deciazulado

A program like VLC is more flexible for doing that but I don't know if there's a version that plays HD discs. What you'd want is for the program to strecth the video signal AND crop the black bars out but if you have a 4:3 monitor that would make Scope movies look squished 2:1.

The other way to do it is just to zoom in (if the program permits) cropping the image's sides like in the pan/scan VHS era to fill the screen without distorting the actors. But then you'd loose up to half the picture if you have a 4:3 monitor.

My monitor is 16:10 (1920x1200, 60Hz, 3000:1, 5ms, 42"), so i'd like to see all the pixels used (or at least 1080 rows). If it looked wrong I'd switch it back but I'd like to try it. I don't know how to set custom zoom in PowerDVD Ultra - I can only make it stretch keeping aspect ratio (preserving black and grey bars), or stretch to fullscreen (preserving grey bars, eliminating black bars), i don't know how to set the zoom to anything else.