If the DVD's were filmed in 16:9 and then converted by the studio to fit the old 4:3 televisions, you can not change it back. Power DVD11 Ulra or any other computer software is not going to magically change it back to 16:9.

You can zoom it up, but then you would be severely cutting off the top and bottom, everyone would be headless. If you stretched it to make it fit, then the picture would appear very wide and that would be unacceptable.

It is available on line here as a DVD.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832117013

I don't know what part of the planet you're from so this link is for the US. Go to CyberLink's home page and mouse over "Store". "Regional Stores" will come up, choose the one closest to you. If that DVD version is old, you're still going to have to come back to the site and up date it, but the updates are free for a given product. If Cyberlink produces Power DVD12, then you would have to pay for that, but because you would already have DVD11, you would pay the upgrade price.

As for the sale going on right now, you will have to contact Cyberlink's customer service directly and ask them. This is just a user to user forum. Maybe one of the moderators can answer this question if they happen to see it.

I don't think you understood my 16/9 // 4/3 issue (or I mis-explained)
a)Studio had a 16/9 video
b)Studio add BLACK AREAS on top+bottom of that video in order to have a 4/3 video
c)They sell the DVD with the modified video on it.
→ the image is 4/3
→ the usefull part of the image is still 16/9
→→ no need to "stretch" or "zoom+cut" to get the initial 16/9 video, we would just have to "cut" the black areas
d)When I play that DVD on my 16/10 monitor, the software (powerdvd8, vlc, wmp...) thinks it's a 4/3 video because of those black areas that the studio integrated in image to make a 4/3 video from a 16/9 video. So, the software just displays that 4/3 video in the center of my screen and add new black areas left+right from my screen
e) I now have a small 16/9 video in center of my 16/10 monitor, with black areas top+bottom+left+right !!

A powerful DVD reader like powerdvd11 could easily implement a function to zoom such video so that is cuts exactly the superfluous top+bottom black areas intgrated in image.
That would be easy to implement ... in the zoom menu I have in powerdvd8, only 2 options: x4 and x16 zooms (useless). Add an option "my dvd has stupid black areas integrated, cut them and fill my 16/9 or 16/10 screen with the 16/9 video we get after cutting the black areas". Programmation is simple : stretch the video to the width of the screen and center it : black areas would automatically disappear because they would be out of the screen.

My question is : does powerdvd11 have this simple option, or does it still only have those useless x4 and x16 zooms ?

Hi,

the most easy way would be to check PowerDVD 11 Trial version.

As Jeff stated if the studio adds the letterboxes to the video it is part of the video, nothing PowerDVD can do about it...

br
Michael Technical Support

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Ok, thanks for reply.
I tried with powerdvd11 trial, but I didn't get what I wanted : there are new zoom options, but I can only activate them if I activate "truetheater" (which seem to alter the video, in a good way, but it's still alteration I might not always want)
None of those options zoomed exactly as I wanted, even if "intelligent 2.35" and "intelligent" were close to it. (I mesured width + hight on screen with a ruler and calculated original ratio + zoom ratios)

I don't understand why this feature, which would be really simple to implement, is not in such a powerful software.
You say "nothing PowerDVD can do about it", but ... let me explain why I think this is wrong
You take a video of a wide format A, and encode black areas to make it fit a less wide format B. Now you have a video of B format on the DVD, and if you play it on a screen of format C, C being wider than B, you get black areas everywhere (top+bottom encoded in video, and left+right added by powerDVD to make the B format video fit the C format screen).
This is common and is A is wider than C, which will most often be the case, the math to zoom the video are realy simple : zoom from the width of B to the width of C (video takes all the with of the screen), and zoom the height with exact same factor
video.newHeight = video.oldHeight*(video.newWidth/video.oldWidth); // where oldHeight and oldWidth are the B format // and newWidth is the width of C
Of course, the video with that "newHight" will be higher than the screen, but just center it, and the areas that will automatically disappear are the artificial blacks areas which were added to go from A to B.

If C is wider than A, which I think will be a rare case, it's harder to do: either the software has to dynamically detect the artificial black areas, either the user has to choose what the A format was so that the software is able to calculate (but user most oftent won't know if A is 16/9, 2.35, 2.xx ...). If too hard to do, just implement the easy case where A is wider than C.




To conclude ... I tried to play my videos and DVDs using VLC and discovered is has the exact feature I need, for FREE ! It's called "crop" (or whatever is the name of the menu 3 rows under "zoom" in English). I just had to "crop" to a C format less wide than A (in my case, A is 2.xx and I cropped to the format of my screen, 16/10), and boom, it cuts the video to size of 16/10 and zooms the result to the size of my screen.

I just saved 60€ ^^
Hope cyberlink will be able to use the little math trick I described here or the same trick than VLC in order to improve powerDVD, because having such a commercial software not being able to do such a simple thing done by a free software is sad

Hi,

I don't think that such feature is on the roadmap.

but thanks for your input

br
Michael Technical Support

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