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Dave, thanks for the feedback. I got a nice response from Tech Support that sheds some lumens on the subject:
“To encode a 2.35:1 produced video (that manufactured by movie studio) in a standard 16:9 container without video distortion, the movie disc's video will be planted with black bars at top and bottom side. They are part of the video content natively.
To play the aforementioned video type in full screen and eliminate the black bars on the top and bottom side, it requires further video cropping features.
Currently, PowerDVD does NOT support the video cropping (crop and zoom) feature for Blu-ray movie playback.
We have escalated the support suggestion to product team as feature development reference. Thanks you for the feedback.”
This seems to imply that it’s not a BDA/copyright restriction and also affirms QC2.0’s thesis that the feature has never existed. It also gives optimism that a future release will support it. I’m currently testing six players and all, with the exception of PowerDVD, will zoom/crop a BD. I will revisit Cyberlink’s effort when the next release appears. Hopefully the product team will work on an implementation of Instant Zoom for Blu-Ray and make the rumor about its support in a future release come true.
John
Thanks so much for your diligent Q & A here about those BD player features we both find of great value-and, I would add, we rightly deserve to enjoy, at least with BDs from our own collections.
https://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/65530.page
Actually, I use zoom on my Pioneer Elite LX500 BD player for one and/or two reasons with some movies: First, with movies like “Blood on the Moon” (194
or “Whirlpool” (1949),which were shot in something other than what was, prior to 1953, the standard “Academy” 1.33:1 AR. Consequently, they will have a relatively smaller image when viewed on a 16:9 (or 4:3) screen, AND with boarders around the entire image. I can find watching this fatiguing enough to sacrifice image content by cropping the image slightly by zooming.
My other use for zooming in on movies with no AR problems when viewed on my screen’s native AR, even if only used temporarily, is that zooming offers a dimension of intimacy with the characters, landscapes and other objects of the scene.
FYI: My Oppo 95, like all Oppos, has zoom, though only the discontinued Arcam BD players and most Pioneers, like my LX500, let you move and center the zoomed image on the screen.
Unfortunately, the BD Assn somehow finds it necessary to endorse and promulgate the use of BD authoring software which disables player zoom control either unconditionally or at least by default but optional zoom enabling. Thus, all of my Criterion Collection, Universal and ScreamFactory BD titles are zoom disabled, though none of my Warners, Kino and almost none of my Twilight Time BDs are.
You said that Total Media Theater player will let you zoom on both DVD AND BD movies. But will it also let you do slow motion?
However, while my new desktop will have a six or 8 core xeon rocket lake processor and at least 16GB of ECC RAM, this review says that TMT is "resource hungry".
https://totalmedia-theatre.en.softonic.com/]https://totalmedia-theatre.en.softonic.com
Does this mean that even a Rocket Lake processor with a TDP of 105 watts and a modern-but NOT gamester level-video card fan noise could be especially noticeable?
In any case, there doesn't appear to be a recent version of TMT available online. Apparently, developer ArcSoft had ended support for it.
https://www.arcsoft.com/]https://www.arcsoft.com
JRiver player is superb in many ways. While I’m not yet set up to use it zoom is apparently very easy to do via one or more handheld learning remotes.
I’m zoom + slo mo here.
https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,130385.msg911732.html#msg911732
But it’s upsetting and surprisingly to learn from tzr916 here that JRiver can’t do slow motion-and that its developers are not apparently working to add that feature, which is common on most hardware BD players.