Help: PC display has invisible border around anamorphic movies (1 Viewer)

[Todd K]

Hi All,

Just got a new PC from Dell and I've noticed a strange occurrence during DVD playback on my LCD monitor.

Material that is 4:3 or 16:9 plays superbly.

However, when I play 2.35:1 anamorphic movies, i get a very thin (maybe a few pixels) border around the entire movie. I find this especially strange since the actual picture put out by the DVD is 16:9, with thin black borders on the top and bottom. My problem is occurring only on the 2.35:1 movie itself.

It happens with all the software DVD players I've tried: Windows Media Player 10, Dell's Cine-something, PowerDVD, and WinDVD.

I call it an invisible border because you can still see the movie, there's just something weird that occurs on the outer pixels.

Anyone ever experience this?

Todd

 

[Keith Paynter]

Todd, it's not really an anomaly. This information is in fact hidden on televisions because of the 'safe area' that computer monitors do not have.

The image is reduced slightly so that more film information appears on TV screens yet stays safely outside the 'safe area' margins. The current Citerion 3-disc of Seven Samauri is reduced in this fashion but also cleanly matted on all four sides, therefore on computer systems, the film appears in a 'box', while on televisions as much of the film's visual can be seen as possible.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_area

 

[Todd K]

Thanks for the reply, Keith, but I don't think that's what's happening here.

It's mostly occuring on movies with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio. These movies normally have thin black borders at the top and bottom even in widescreen displays, as you know. My problem is occuring where these black borders meet the picture, and on the sides, too.

Take a look at these examples (.98 mb each, sorry)

http://geocities.com/toddkluss/PDVD_000.BMP

That's from Lawrence of Arabia. You can most notice the "invisible border" at the top, near the left by the ceiling fan.

http://geocities.com/toddkluss/PDVD_001.BMP

This is the Warner Brothers logo from my Superman: The Movie DVD. You can clearly see the border all the way around. This is the only time I've ever seen this problem happen in a 16:9 picture.

http://geocities.com/toddkluss/PDVD_002.BMP

This last one was taken from Star Trek 2. You can notice the problem the most above Spock's head. The border's also on the side, too.

 

[Ken Chan]

I just tried your links and got: Sorry, this GeoCities site is currently unavailable.

Try compressing to PNG or at least JPG. Looks like Paint will do PNG.

 

[Todd K]

Ok, I've moved the file locations to a more reliable host:



http://home.gwu.edu/~kluss/PDVD_000.BMP

That's from Lawrence of Arabia. You can most notice the "invisible border" at the top, near the left by the ceiling fan.

http://home.gwu.edu/~kluss/PDVD_001.BMP

This is the Warner Brothers logo from my Superman: The Movie DVD. You can clearly see the border all the way around. This is the only time I've ever seen this problem happen in a 16:9 picture.

http://home.gwu.edu/~kluss/PDVD_002.BMP

This last one was taken from Star Trek 2. You can notice the problem the most above Spock's head. The border's also on the left side, too.

 

[ChristopherDAC]

There's nothing at all odd in what you're seeing. It's most often seen on PC monitors and front-projection setups, because the whole image is visible. It's an artefact of the DVD encoding process, a form of ringing produced by the imperfections of the conversion between the pixel domain and the frequency domain. As you might expect, it shows up mostly on DVDs which exhibit other kinds of ringing, often called (imprecisely) "edge enhancement". Lawrence is well known as a case of "EE".

 

[Ray Chuang]

You forgot to tell us what graphics card are you using.

I ask this question because most DVD decoding software often take advantage of the special DVD hardware acceleration features built into the graphics card, and if that implementation doesn't work correctly you will get a funny display. That's why I love ATI graphics cards for DVD playback--most of their Radeon line of chipsets work superbly with DVD playback software such as PowerDVD and WinDVD.

 

[Todd K]

I have a 256MB ATI Radeon X1300 Pro.

ChristopherDAC, thanks for your input, too. All I needed was someone to tell me that's normal to satisfy my obsessive/compulsive tendencies!