[gabbott]

I'm running XBMC Live on my HTPC on my 1080p display. Any videos that I play that are actually 16:9 720p (1280x720) has a couple inches of black bars on the sides of the display. In order to remove it I have to set the view mode to stretch 16:9. I'd like to not have to do that.
One thing I notice on normal view when I hit C it tells me the sizing is (1280x720)->(1810x1018). I've calibrated my display and it is running at 1920x180@60Hz.

Any 720p videos I have that are a wider ratio (ex. 2.35:1) does not exhibit this problem nor does any of my SD videos that are 16:9.

Edit: Well looking further, I also have some SD content that exhibits this same behavior. Running the same SD content on the latest SVN on xbox doesn't give me this issue. Also I should mention I see this with every 720p "scene" rip that the ratio is 16:9 as well. Oh and I suppose this probably should have gone into the Linux section, but wasn't sure it was specific to XBMC live or not.

[gabbott]

So it seems the issue is specific to content that is exactly 16:9. If I have a video that is anything other than 1280x720, like one that is 1280x688 for example, it does fill the screen and I don't get any black bars on the sides.

[jmarshall]

You've calibrated to 1018 pixels high. Notice that 1810/1018 == 16/9. XBMC zooms the picture so that at least one dimension (in this case the height) fills the display.

When you play something wider than 16x9 then it's filling the width first and you have black bars top and bottom instead.

elupus just added a feature over the last couple of days to allow a small amount of inaccuracy (by default 3%) in the aspect ratio allowing it to fill both dimensions.

Cheers,
Jonathan

[gabbott]

Ah, that makes sense. So it is really happening because of the properties of the overscan on my DLP set and how I've compensated by the video calibration in XBMC.

So this sounds like it could be resolved by either the new feature you mention or adjusting my calibration. Though by doing the latter would cause the skin I'm using to have info cutoff. That brings up a question, and I've been using XBMC for a long time so maybe I should know this, but can the video calibration for a skin be changed independently from video calibration for video?

[bobo1on1]

You can set the zoom factor for a skin, it's not really calibration but it should be good enough.

[gabbott]

You can set the zoom factor for a skin, it's not really calibration but it should be good enough.

Ah that is a very good point. I can try that. Thanks!

[gabbott]

I just updated my xbmc-live to the latest PPA SVN and with the new option that was added that Jmarshal mentioned resolves my issue with the 16:9 content.