The tablet's 15:9 screen matches none of the popular movie/TV formats (4:3, 16:9, 2,35:1,...).
How do you prefer watching video content on your tablet? I've included all the choices I've experimented with in the past, if I missed something, please choose "other" and post.

You might have different preferences depending on the aspect ration of the source material: 4:3 vs. any widescreen format (16:9 and wider), this is why I chose to make a "2 in 1" poll that allows you to vote differently for widescreen and for 4:3.

(Oh, yes, and: Please choose what you'd prefer if you had the choice, not what you actually have available for whatever reason.)

Source. No ifs and or buts. Pan and scan, zooming, cropping, stretching, whatever, they're all about as evil as it can get.

Given a choice of the source format, though, 16:9 works nicely.

Well, tablet's screen is 16:10 FYI

15:9

Widescreen computer monitors are 16:10 (though they're starting to trend towards 16:9).

Since you pretty much have to reencode for the tablet, I crop 16:9 videos to 15:9 when reencoding.

I tend to avoid 4:3 videos on the tablet, since they are a very poor fit for the screen.

Don't you mind the black bars that sometimes take more than 50% of the screen?

I found (after a lot of trial and error) that I enjoy videos most when they're full screen. The tablet's screen is small enough, so why not use all of it?
I also found that you can safely crop most widescreen productions to 16:9 without loosing anything important. They seem to shoot films so that they look good on a 16:9 tv screen. On a screen as small as the tablet's, the difference between 16:9 and 15:9 is only a few pixels... So I cut off the left and right part and use 15:9, full screen.

4:3 is different. You cannot easily cut off top and bottom to make it fit our screens, this will always cut people's faces in close-ups. Also, stretching the image is too extreme, it doesn't look good. But a combination of both works. If I cut off only a little to achieve 14:9 it is hardly more than what TV productions calculate for overscan. The remaining difference - 14:9 to 15:9 - can be achieved by a little stretching..... still noticable, but by far not as bad as the 4:3=>15:9 strech, and very acceptable.

I find it very interesting to see in this poll that a lot of people don't seem to bother and simply take the source material without changes. I would have bet it was different.

Cropping? :shudder: If you're not going to watch it in the original aspect ratio you don't deserve to watch it. . . .

No. I will crop to action safe, so as to devote the bits to where they matter, but I won't change the aspect ratio.

Cropping doesn't mean to change the aspect ratio - I don't do this on widescreen material. I just remove the parts on the left&right, but the aspect ratio stays intact.

About "deserving to watch": Wouldn't I do this, I wouldn't, in fact, watch the film at all because it's so small that I better only encode the soundtrack and listen to it as audio file.

is mencoder's best friend.

Add black bars back in if you like, but please don't encode with them.