Hi guys + gals I'm thinking of taking the plunge into the sea of big TVs in the next month or so. I think I'm pretty sure of the choice of plasma over LCD, also that the screen will be an 8th gen 42" pio. The one thing that I am looking for an answer to now is the following. 90%+ of my watching is done with my HTPC as the source. Now the problem is that of the rectangular pixels on the screen and having the HTPC think it is dealing with a 4:3 screen due to the selection of the 1024x768 res. I use media portal (install on XP) to watch most of my TV and PowerDVD to watch DVDs. Has anyone figured a reliable way to get the aspect ratio correct with the 4:3 -> 16:9 conversion? Does PowerStrip off this, ideally the solution would apply to windows in general rather than just individual programs. Many thanks Eric
Im a little puzzled by your question and converting 4:3 to 16:9, simply changing the windows resolution to a 16:9 aspect ratio to match the TV will be suffice.
When you select 1024x768 windows still assumes that the pixels will be square and not rectangular like the plasma pixels. When a program i.e. Power DVD, plays a video it will calculate the amount of back at the top and bottom due to the ratio based on square pixels. When this output is fed to the screen it will stretch it width ways, not into more pixels but visually due to the pixel shape. I've read about other people asking the question but I've never seen a well accepted answer yet. Thanks Eric
You've misunderstood pixels, there is no such thing as a rectangle pixel(atleast I think so). What defines whether a screen is 4:3 or 16:19 is the legth/width ratio of pixels. 1280 by 1024 square pixels would be a 4/3 aspect ratio. 1920 by 1080 square pixels would be a 16/9 aspect ratio. Hope you understand now. Edit, Did a google and there does seem to be something different with plasma screens and rectangle pixels.
In wmp there is an option to adjust the pixel width so in theory anything that uses wmp as the video overlay should be adjusted by this setting. As for power dvd I dont know but if you use the combined community codec package with the bundled wmp classic video ratios are selectable and this will play dvds too. http://pixelmapping.wikispaces.com/+42-inch+Plasma+Info