4:3 and 16:9 Border Color Question

[GaryJ73167]

Hello All. If this has been covered, I apologize for asking again, but, I did a search and couldn't find my answer.

I have backed up many of my movies into the Xvid format using handbrake, and, everything has been working fine.

I have a question though, is there a way that i can change the border color from black to something else (preferably a much lighter color)?

When I am watching a 4:3 movie, I get the black borders on both sides, or, if I am watching the wide screen format, I get the black bars on top and bottom

The reason i am asking about this, is, my TV suffered image burn where the 4:3 bars usually are. It has 2 faint bars permanently burned into both sides of the screen, and, I don't want it to happen on the top and bottom of the screen now when watching super wide screen.

If I stretch the picture on my TV, it loses allot of clarity, so, if I can get the bars a lighter shade, i can still enjoy the movie with good quality.

Any help you can give me would be greatly appreciated.

[remyhelsinki]

The bars you see either from 4:3 content (if on a widescreen tv) or from any widescreen ratio that doesn't fill up the whole screen are determined by your tv or possibly your input device.

If you open any of the movies you have encoded with handbrake on your computer you will see that those bars do not exist and that the player window coincides with the aspect ratio of the movie.

To solve your problem you would have to see if the input device or tv you are using to watch the movies has an option to change the color from black to something else but I've never personally seen that option on any of my equipment so it could easily not exist. If you are running a line from a computer to your tv and using VLC or Mplayer or something else then there may be a software option to do this but I'm not familiar enough to know if there is.

The only other "hack" options I can think of are to import the movies into something like final cut and then overlay them on a background color of your choosing. However I would not recommend it as the results would most likely be bad (re-encoding encoded material), but I guess it is an option. Also if you are using a computer as your player then you could set your desktop to a color then have the movie fill the width or height but not have it play fullscreen so that your desktop becomes the bars of the difference in the ratio between your video material and your screen. However that isn't ideal either.

Good luck.

[GaryJ73167]

That makes allot of sense. Thanks for your reply. I guess I will just deal with it. At this point, it doesn't seem like I have much of a choice.

I have no option on my TV that can change the border color unfortunately.

Thanks again for your help..

Gary