Hi John2090073,

Could you share a screen shot of this please? I'd like to see how it looks when you are wathching in full screen.

Greetings

Hicham Technical support:
EN: https://www.cyberlink.com/support/contact-support.jsp
DE: https://de.cyberlink.com/support/contact-support.jsp
FR: https://fr.cyberlink.com/support/contact-support.jsp
ES: https://es.cyberlink.com/support/contact-support.jsp

It cannot be done. The zoom feature of PowerDVD is disabled when a Blu-ray disc is detected. (I'm actually surprised a representative of Cyberlink is unaware of this and asked for a screenshot.)

If you Google this, you'll see it's been an ongoing complaint about PowerDVD for some time now—since 21:9 monitors came out. A partial solution is here but it doesn't work completely properly with a 3440x1440 resolution screen. (You'll also note that this was also posted on a Cyberlink forum, where a different employee gave the correct response.)

I don't know why Cyberlink has not yet allowed zoom to work with Blu-ray discs. The claim has been that the horizontal black bars are part of the encoding—but other Blu-ray capable players do indeed allow you to zoom Blu-ray playback. (VLC, Kodi, Leawo...). So this is not a technical limitation. It may be that it's a legal limitation, and while Cyberlink could do it, they are unwilling to do it. It's not entirely clear to me, but it may be that the black bars are actually enforced as part of AACS Blu-ray copy protection. (If that's the case, I find it totally absurd since they have nothing at all to do with copy protection.)

Blu-ray copy protection can be removed with software like RedFox's AnyDVD—and that's the only way to get Blu-ray discs to display on the other software players I mentioned (and cropped / zoomed to fill an entire 3440x1440 21:9 monitor.)

I have a 21:9 monitor, and own both PowerDVD 16 and AnyDVD. I've been struggling with this for quite some time now. There is no question that PowerDVD supports some Blu-ray discs better (in particular, I bought PowerDVD because VLC couldn't properly handle one of the Star Trek episodes in my Blu-ray set—I have no idea why there was a problem with a specific episode) but I also watch anything with an aspect ratio of 21:9 (or 2.4:1) with VLC instead. I hate having to go back and forth between software just because of something silly like this.

One other point is that PowerDVD seems to base its "decison" on the existence of Blu-ray media when it disables the zoom feature—it's not basing its decision on the existence of AACS. Even when AnyDVD is enabled, and AACS is removed, the zoom function is still not present on Blu-ray playback. (With VLC, the feature is called "crop", not "zoom".)

Quote It cannot be done. The zoom feature of PowerDVD is disabled when a Blu-ray disc is detected. (I'm actually surprised a representative of Cyberlink is unaware of this and asked for a screenshot.)

Same here... I'm still hoping they change their decision.

Considering you can zoom and distort the picture but you can't crop it without distortion.

I recently played a regular DVD that was posterboxed. (Black bars on all 4 sides.) I discovered that PowerDVD's zoom feature doesn't do what I had thought it did at all—even if only on DVDs. It doesn't serve as a "crop" function, but as something horrible that stretches things all out of their original aspect ratio. Kodi's "zoom" does it right. I don't really understand the purpose behind PowerDVD's zoom.

(To be fair, PowerDVD 17 no longer has anything in the UI called "zoom"—instead, it's a series of "fit to" options. Perhaps they actually removed PowerDVD 16's zoom function altogether...)

So, even with DVDs, there is a major feature missing from this otherwise excellent piece of software.

(I ended up watching the DVD with VLC instead.)

Hi,

Please make sure you disabled the high performance mode. In this mode the following features are unavailable:

• Video rotation.


• Video Scene Selector (Video mark in/out).


• Instant Preview.Instant Zoom (Zoom in/out).


• Dual subtitle display.


• Subtitle customization for font, color, and size.Video snapshot.If required, you can disable high performance mode in video settings.

To find it please go through "Settings" to "#Video, Audio, Subtitles" and "More Video Settings".

Greetings
Hicham Technical support:
EN: https://www.cyberlink.com/support/contact-support.jsp
DE: https://de.cyberlink.com/support/contact-support.jsp
FR: https://fr.cyberlink.com/support/contact-support.jsp
ES: https://es.cyberlink.com/support/contact-support.jsp

> Please make sure you disabled the high performance mode.

After disabling high performance mode, I do see the Zoom function return to PowerDVD 17—and I can confirm that Zoom is different than the "fit to" options.

I didn't actually test it with a Blu-ray (although I assume it's not available) but it doesn't matter because even with a DVD it still fails to work correctly. What happens is that when Zoom is incremented to the lowest setting the aspect ratio is completely messed up. (Just as with "fit to".) If you increase the Zoom setting a bit more, the aspect ratio returns to what it should be—but by then too much of the picture has been cropped.

With the DVD I had used before, not only are the posterbox black bars removed, but so is a noticeable amount of the picture itself.

I can't honestly recall if PowerDVD 16 had this problem, although I don't feel as if it did. But, either there is some regression here that prevents the use of the lowest Zoom setting, or it has never worked entirely correctly. In either case, it's not possible to "finely tune" Zoom to remove posterbox black bars while still retaiing the aspect ratio.