Vista Media Center and Widescreen video

[dr_doak]

I probably going to whack my MCE 2005 PC in the near future to install Vista Ultimate. I also bought a nice 32" 720p TV not long ago. I notice that when I playback recorded shows on the TV, widscreen video (ie: Stargate SG-1) still shows up in normal format with the black bars top and bottom. So really, it's the same size video as what I had on my old 26" CRT TV.

Does Vista's Media Center have the intelligence to recognize widescreen formatted video whan it sees it, or will I keep having this problem?

Thanks!

[Bob12]

I have a 16x9 HD monitor on my Vista system running at 1920x1200 resolution. I don't currently have a TV feed into the system but I do watch DVDs on it. The only ones that don't have the black bars above and below the picture are those made at about 1.85:1 aspect ratio. Anything "wider" such as another common ratio of 2.35:1 will have the black bars, albeit narrower than on a 12x9 display.

All that being said, I've seen a lot of 16x9 displays set to fill the screen regardless of the material's aspect ratio. This has the effect of distoring the image, sometimes badly. Check the different display settings of your TV and see if possibly one of the other settings makes it look better. On my Mitsubishi TV, I use "narrow" mode for most TV shows which preserves the 12x9 format by placing vertical bars on the left and right. For DVDs, I use "Expand" which strecthes the picture horizontally to fill the width of the screen without distorting it. This minimizes the top and bottom bars for anything over 1.85. Then, for HDTV, I use the "Normal" setting which fills the screen, also without distortion.