Notices

i totally agree with totololo. why go for 400x240 if our tablet can handle better resolution for movies?
for me, one consideration to be made is should i remain the aspect ratio or change to fill the whole tablet screen...still considering. yet, full screen looks good...

I find you can maintain aspect ratio (this just means you don't stretch or squeeze the picture) but trim about 10% off of the sides of most DVD releases, and you get fullscreen video on the tablet.

Ack! No! I've alerted the pan and scan patrol and they'll be knocking on your door any second now!

Tim

Hardly, Tim. Look at this example that the Wikipedia article uses:



The tablet's screen dimensions fall outside the yellow box, since we have 1.66:1 ratio, as opposed to the 1.56:1 of the yellow box. I have found that there is very little (of importance) lost by cropping the edges.

Having said that, I'm not advocating cropping as a universal rule. I'm just saying that for most mobile use-cases, the pleasure of full-screen video outweighs the lost picture on the edges. We're not talking Imax here, we're talking about a handheld device.

And I must remind you that the more unused, black screen you have above and below your video, the more lost information you have within the picture. When you're talking about a small screen like the tablet's, it is a great loss indeed. All sorts of little details get lost because the picture is so small, just because you want to see what's going on in the far edges of the picture.

Tell that to Michael J. Fox!

http://www.michaeljfoxdatabase.com/j05_mm_wsvspns.html



Tim

Ok, you're just goofing around, but I want to point out again that the tablets have a 1.66 wide screen already, not the 1.33 screen the pan-and-scan haters usually refer to. And I said that I don't advocate cropping in other use cases.

Bah! If your goal is to maximize the utility of the limited bits you have available in a constricted environment such as low bandwidth streaming or, well, the tablets, cropping to action safe is a reasonable choice. It's a far cry from pan-and-scan, and the majority of material in any given DVD collection stands a good chance of having been created before plasma and LCD sets became the norm. Perhaps today a director can reasonably place critical material in that zone, but he or she would have been foolish to do so even a few years ago.

Qole i agree with you ... I hate cropping and streching, but on a very small screen, cropping just a little little bit doesn't bother me.

By the way, i noticed that there must be something with the upscaling process in the tablet ... it seems to work better with certain resolutions than others, even with slightly less pixels ... but all of this is very experimental ...

Ok, guys, settle down. I was caught by the Qole.

Tim

I'm in Tim's purest camp. I feel dirty enough cropping as it is. I also only do the 7 minute album version; not the 3 minute single. I can't be qoled on this.