Playing Leon DVD on my Xbox360

[r5kod]

Ive been using my 360 as a DVD player for a while now (saving up for a blueray player). Ive never come across this before, but I borrowed the Leon DVD from a friend recently and ive got a bit of a problem with it. The DVD Menu appears to display properly, but when I actually play the film it has quite big black borders on every side of the picture. Id expect to see black bars on the top and bottom for widescreen movies, or on either side for 4:3 sources, but why would it be displaying with black bars all round?

 

[bianco]

Its possible the DVD was encoded at a lower resolution. Try setting the stretch to fit mode and that should sort it.

 

[DragonOfSilver]

This means the dvd was encoded in a non anamorphic fashion, the letter boxes at top and bottom are encoded onto the dvd itself for a 4:3 frame to display on non widescreen tv's, unlike anarmophic dvd's where the widescreen picture is squashed sideways to fill the full frame, and then either the tv stretches it back again, or dvd player squashes it down and adds letter boxes. the dvd player does not know about it being a widescreen picture and just sees it as a 4:3 image, and thus adds its own sidebars to fit it to the screen at correct aspect ratio, not sure if the xbox player has a zoom function to get it to fill the screen or not, but this is what is needed to 'fix' the problem.

 

[r5kod]

OK I will give it a go. Ive actually tried the DVD on a standard DVD player and it does as expected, plays in widescreen automatically. I assume that the normal DVD player is just making a different decision about what it should do with the content and automatically stretching it across the screen without asking me or expecting me to tell it to stretch?

 

[r5kod]

Just tried changing the display options on the xbox. Changing the display modes does stretch the imagine alot further across the screen, although I cant completely remove all the bars from either side of the image, I guess this is just a side-effect of the DVD not being anamorphic?

 

[DragonOfSilver]

Probably, I'd experiment myself but not sure I've got such a dvd, they're thankfully pretty rare. What connection are you using, component/composite or vga/hdmi?

 

[r5kod]

Im using the official VGA cable plugged into a Sony 32D3000 TV

 

[DragonOfSilver]

Aha, how big at the letterboxes its leaving still? I'm guessing it might be not quite filling the screen in an assumption that there would be some overscan, which VGA will usually not have.

 

[r5kod]

id say they are just over 1cm either side of the image

 

[waynertron]

Hi,

I have the same Leon DVD, and it is non anamorphic (shame as it's one of my favourite films). I think they brought an anamorphic version later, after I gave up looking
I see the same effects on an elite going via HDMI. In normal mode you get huge bars all around the image. In 'stretch' mode you still get about 1.5cm bars either side of the image. You can get rid of those with zoom level 1, but you lose a little of the image on left and right.

Wayne.

 

[r5kod]

thanks for all your help, looks like ill just get down to watching it and forget about getting the picture quite right!