DvbDream Community

A very cool feature I would LOVE is AUTO ZOOM on letterboxed content. My old plasma TV had this feature on its S-Video input and it worked great for a standalone sat receiver. Now I am using DVI with a PC to my plasma and this feature is not available via DVI input. The TV was 16:9 widescreen, but many North American programs now are 4:3 letterboxed (such as MythBusters). This means the video is 4:3, but has black bars on top and bottom to make it widescreen. This is VERY annoying, because this results in a huge black border on all sides of the picture leaving only a 34" picture on my 50" TV!

I'm not sure how the AUTO ZOOM algorithm worked, but I think it looked for bars on the top & bottom of a certain size with an average brightness below a certain level (dark gray bars also triggered it sometimes), and if they remain long enough (about 2-seconds), this triggered the TV into zoom mode so the letterboxed 4:3 fully fills a 16:9 widescreen. Once activity was detected in the letterbox areas (i.e. a 4:3 commercial that fills the entire 4:3 display area), the display would un-zoom.

Try right mouse click > Aspect ratio options, or ffdshow, more here:

http://www.dvbdream.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=18

I know how to do it manually, but I would like it to be fully automatic.
So 4:3 content will have black bars on the sides of a 16:9 monitor, but once the 4:3 is letterboxed to widescreen, it automatically zooms.
I don't know if that makes sense or not?

Auto zoom is not possible because it requires each video frame to be analysed. CPU > high.