Squeeze DVD playback for anamorphic lens on a Mac? (1 Viewer)

[Jennifer B]

Hi,

I'm running a 4:3 projector on a PowerMac with OS X 10.4. I have an anamorphic lens to utilize the full projector resolution when watching 16:9 material. But to make this work correctly, the Mac needs to stretch widescreen movies vertically by 33% to fill the entire 4:3 screen and remove the black bars. The lens will later correct the distortion.

I haven't found a function in Apple's own DVD player to do this. Is there any software that squeezes/stretches DVD playback (ideally also video files from my HD) for use with the anamorphic lens?

 

[Kimmo Jaskari]

There seems to be a real dearth of decent DVD players for the Mac.

You might want to give http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ a whirl. It's a media player rather than a DVD player but it can apparently play VIDEO_TS files off a DVD (never tried it due to not having a Mac...)

Good luck.

 

[Jennifer B]

Actually, I found out from another board that "squeeze" function is build right into the Apple DVD player. I just hadn't found it.

So if anyone else has the same problem:
Go to Window / Video Zoom (not the regular Zoom). A transparent overlay will open, click "On" in the top-left corner and you can adjust width and height with the two sliders or choose a pre-defined setting from the pull-down.


VLC is a nice player and I have it too, but AFAIK it doesn't allow to scale video out of proportion. Or does it? I only saw this Postprocessing entry under the Video menu but it doesn't seem to do anything.