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Windows Media Center Question

R

Ramaddil

n00b
Joined
Mar 30, 2009
Messages
60
I am running a hauppauge 2250 Tv Tuner in my Windows 7 Machine and I have done most all of the setup. Everything is almost right but I have a problem. I set this machine to record my shows, and it does. I am then watching them on a different PC. Here lies my problem I am able to play them but when I play it in Windows Media Player it does not fill up the screen. It is a smaller box.

http://i39.photobucket.com/albums/e172/Ramaddil/Screen2.jpg

This is what it looks like with the screen maximized. I have looked through all the settings and can not figure it out. My HTPC box has a 17 monitor and my main pc has a 24 inch monitor. When i try to watch it on my HTPC box it displays fine and in full screen but not on the 24 inch monitor.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
 
That doesn't look like a widescreen show. The channel logo goes under the picture.
 
Snowknight26 said:
It is widescreen (as the screenshot clearly shows).
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Click to expand...

Nope, it's not. It's 4:3 video with letterboxing - you can clearly tell by looking at the Discovery watermark at the bottom right of the screen and how it overlaps onto the black bars of the letterboxing.

OP: You would either need to record from a native widescreen source (read: a high definition channel) or use a player that has special scaling abilities (MPC, VLC, etc).

I'm guessing the reason it 'displays fine and in full screen' on the OP's HTPC box is either A: His HTPC monitor isn't widescreen or B: the player he's using on the HTPC does the kind of stretching/scaling I mentioned above.
 
Blue Falcon said:
Nope, it's not. It's 4:3 video with letterboxing - you can clearly tell by looking at the Discovery watermark at the bottom right of the screen and how it overlaps onto the black bars of the letterboxing.
Click to expand...

This is correct.

With media center, you can just use the zoom action. There are 4 zoom settings. You can either use the mouse to select it (need to go to the zoom menu item), or program your remote with ctrl+shift+z which toggles between aspect ratios.
 
Blue Falcon said:
Nope, it's not.
Click to expand...

Of course it is, but Discovery decided to fit it to a 4:3 feed, and as a result, has to be letterboxed, like you said. The show is widescreen but the video feed isn't.

The video player doesn't have any knowledge of video's contents. Because the video is 4:3 (but the show is 16:9 fit to a 4:3 feed), the 4:3 video, when displayed on a 16:9 screen, will have outer borders on the left and right, as well as inner borders (in the video itself) on the top and bottom (as you can see by the Discovery logo).

Therefore, the player is displaying the video correctly.

Granted, because this show is letterboxed, you can fit the video to a 16:9 display by cropping it and you won't lose any content aside from the logo (because the show is letterboxed), but if the next show is actually 4:3, you'll be incorrectly cropping parts of the video and thus changing the aspect ratio.
 
is that clear QAM or plain NTSC? If it's NTSC then that's SD and its going to be 4:3 no matter what. Not a lot of cable systems put channels like Discovery out in the clear on HD, and if it's Comcast they may do Digital SD in the clear for a while but will eventually turn it off once they finished their upgrade in the area.
 
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