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Originally Posted by madlabs
EM, I am profoundly ignorant in this area as your very well written treatise informed me. I knew I didn't know much but wow. Thanks for taking the time to write that up. The devil is always in the details.
I think for me that cropping is likely the best alternative. I wish that I could just use my DVD player as everything always looks the best from DVD. However, much of the stuff I watch isn't available and it would be an expensive undertaking. There are only a few things I watch multiple times. Most content I watch was originally recorded in 4:3, when I watch newer stuff I do so on a newer TV.
Just so we know what hardware I have, I run the HDMI from the laptop to an HDMI to Composite converter and then into a BT RF modulator. The HDMI converter is a cheapie, I am totally willing to buy a better one.
I'm looking into VLC. Quite a bit of stuff I play is from archive.org so I should be able to DL it and then play through VLC. I will try that this week and see what I get. It doesn't seem at a glance that I can play Amazon Prime content through VLC, is that correct? Amazon has been adding quite a few oldies lately and I do watch a fair bit from there.
I can see I need to do some more reading. I need to learn more about 4:3 content that has been converted to 16:9 because I think that is what I watch most. Thanks to all for your time and I will be back with more questions.
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I don't have prime so I don't know/haven't looked in to VLC compatibility.
It may be possible to make your HDMI converter and PC work as is with VLC. If you are able to run a 16X9 aspect ratio program (assuming your computer sees the HDMITOAV converter as a 16x9 device and it by default displays as full screen 4x3 compressed on your vintage TV then it may work. You may want to try to go into display settings on your PC and try to set aspect ratio the computer sends via HDMI to the device to 4x3...menus vary a lot between OS and hardware combos and sometimes if it exists it is burried in advanced administrator settings in sub-menus of sub-menus so you gotta explore thoroughly...it should be a lot easier (or it may be absolutely necessary) to get what you want out of VLC configuration if you can get the OS display driver to treat the HDMITOAV box as a 4x3 device (might be good to set a circular object as your desktop background to see if the computer is feeding the converter 16x9 and the converter is feeding the TV a horizontally compressed version (or exactly what its doing). Setting OS aspect ratio is easier in windows 7 IIRC... sometimes it is best to have a separate media PC so you can mess with settings without fear of messing up your main rig and so you can install less secure or enjoyable for normal computing OS and hardware combos that better support media playback.
In VLC if you press the A key on your keyboard aspect ratio and will toggle through a bunchof options (shift+A is audio output device, though I may have shift backwards) and C (or shift C is crop) there may be a zoom or stretch too.... Google VLC keyboard shortcuts and you may find what you want. Play with those settings and common video aspect ratio formats and see how it changes things. VLC forgets those settings Everytime you close it and returns to default when opened so if you mess anything up reopening VLC should get you back where you started, downside is you have to tweak it for everything you open.
I wish I had more exact guidance on this, but since I wanted to have the same HDMI simultaneously feed a 16x9 set correctly and a cropped 4x3 image to a vintage set I didn't explore the option of setting aspect ratio of the HDMI at the PC in depth in my setup...most of what I know comes from playing with what I have, and much of the rest is looking analytically at everything new I see.
There's a bunch of different approaches to fitting 4x3 into 16x9 some common ones are the standard pillarboxing, horizontal stretch, making the pillars a blury mirror of adjacent video and non-linear stretch (ie leave most of the center barely stretched and stretch the edges more....you see this more in the menus of HDTVs than broadcast). Newer documentaries sometimes mish-mash formats and conversion techniques in ways that can make no single setting satisfying over the entire program.
Been a few years since I messed with it but I have a D-Link DSM-520 media player that can stream some content from the web or a personal media server and play files off a USB...it's probably more than 15 years old and I only used the USB playback functionality so what it will stream today I don't know...I do know some video formats 5-7 years ago were not able to be played so what value it would be to you I can't say...it did have composite output and availability to configure aspect ratio handling IIRC.