Hello team,

I have Vista MCE HTPC connected to a Sony 32" TV with HDMI connection (resolution 1366 x 768 pixels)

Everything is ok, MCE main window and Vista desktop are perfectly displayed full-screen.

I currently receive Digital TV, most of broadcasts have 4:3 format, so I see black areas at left and right sides of the image.

However, movies are generally transmitted in 16:9, so I have the movie window in the center of the 4:3 window, leaving black bars at top and bottom.

End of story: in this situation I have black bars at right, left, top and bottom of the screen, and the movie windows is much smaller than 32". The same happens with recorded TV, only a small section of the screen is used by MCE view.

When I receive the same movie directly on the Sony TV, I have the possibility to enlarge the screen to completely fill the area, having 14:9 and 16:9 aspect ratio. But when using the VGA and HDMI input, this setting is not available, should be configured directly on the PC (manual says).

There is a way to "enlarge" the active window in MCE, so I can remove the black bars filling completely the display ?

Thank you for suggestion.

Mario

If you press the  i  button on the media center remote while watching tv you will find there is a zoom option and there are four zoom modes to choose.

If you dont have a remote you can right click with a mouse to get the zoom menu

zoom mode 2 should fill your screen and remove the black bars from all sides....

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-Cory

Thanks a lot to all, I realize it was a trivial question, anyway... never too late to learn something !

Just another quick question: Vista MCE is not able to play files with .divx extension. Do you think it's beacuse the divx codecs are not installed ? Or VISTA MCE should be able to play divx files without additional drivers ?

Which codec pack do you suggest to work with MCE ? Official download from www.divx.com, or something else ?

Thanks again,

mditerli

I've had success with the ffdshow-tryouts. I'm not a great fan of codec packs.

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Thanks a lot for the suggestion, I found the website. If you support this program as "working with MCE" I will try and let you know.

I have downloaded and installed the ffdshow packet. I see the icons in the taskbar (video and audio decoder) when running Windows Media Player, and I can run the configuration program.

Media Center, however, does not recognize the extension .divx, and .divx movies are not displayed in the video catalog (even if they are there). If I assign the .divx extension to Media Center, MCE starts double clicking the file, but nothing happens.

How to configure MCE to use ffdshow codecs ?

mditerli

For the "unsuported files to show up in My videos, you need to update the registry. There are a few thread on this site explaining how to do this.

Here is how to add visibility to .mp4 file, you can do the same for other extensions.

Modify the registry manually, or Create a file in notebook, cut and paste below content in it, change it for the extension you want to see, save it with the extension .reg, then execute it to modify the registry

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Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.mp4]
"PerceivedType"="video"
"Content Type"="video/mp4"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Multimedia\WMPlayer\Extensions\.mp4]
"Runtime"=dword:00000007
"Permissions"=dword:0000000f
"UserApprovedOwning"="yes"

Thanks, I will try later.

My question is: this settings is to "show up" the files in "My Videos", but is MCE able to "play" these files also ? (not only to see). Will MCE use the "ffdshow" codecs ?

Hello all,

installed ffdshow pack, everything is now ok, I can play Divx files from MCE.

Another experiment done: I tried to play DVD's using Cyberlink MPEG2 decoder from MCE (using the utility to change the default MCE decoder). Quality looks better than the standard MPEG2 decoder, but this Cyberlink decoder has some strange behavior with screen resolution 1360 x 768 (which is the native resolution of my TV). Images are distorted in height (taller). To have the right images, I had to set 1280 x 768, fortunately this resolution is also supported by my TV

Thank you for the support !