Media Player

[sparky77]

Whats the best media player for keeping the correct aspect ratio with out getting black bars all the way around some ratios?

My computer setup is an old p3-700 running Windos XP with an Nvidia Geforce 5200fx connected to a Hanspree 28inch via dvi to hdmi adapter.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

This is a a very, VERY old pc you got there, but If I were you - I'd try a couple of things and try to the DxVA gods out there....
Update to win xp sp3 if you haven't done it yet, latest Nvidia catalyst driver.
Get newest MPC-HC (I love SVN (dev builds) ) - from here:
http://www.xvidvideo.ru/media-player-classic-home-cinema-x86-x64/

Make sure to use video output to regular overlay.

And like I said before pray to gods that your DVDs will play using DxVA

http://imouto.my/watching-h264-videos-using-dxva/

P.s: MPC is highly customizable and it'll give you good amount of image resizing/aspect ratios and scalling

 

[jinjuku]

Not going to happen. That monitor is a fixed resolution panel. You either send it 1900X1080 or you don't.

Your CPU/Video Card is so old as to most likely only support VGA/SVGA/XVGA resolutions

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Not going to happen. That monitor is a fixed resolution panel. You either send it 1900X1080 or you don't.

Your CPU/Video Card is so old as to most likely only support VGA/SVGA/XVGA resolutions

Partly true, but while the resolution is fixed, mpc still can scale and overscan to eliminate black bars

 

[jinjuku]

Still going to look like crap...

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Still going to look like crap...

True that...

 

[sparky77]

What I figured out so far was to set the flat panel as the primary display and use full screen in Windows Media player, and the picture looks perfectly fine.

 

[jinjuku]

I could see DVD playback looking acceptable with a 28" display since the GPU is going to internally scale the video but you could get more out of it by getting that panel driven at it's native resolution.

I don't know if I would try that with my 100" screen.