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EVO Handbrake Movie Setting Dilema...

Camslam

Well-Known Member
Apr 1, 2010
169
75
Handbrake works great and I have transferred plenty of music and movies to my EVO. One problem - UTILIZING THE FULL SCREEN!

Can anyone shed some light on this situation?

1. Can anyone give straightforward, simple, instructions for how to convert movies to get them sized to use the full EVO screen and still have an excellent top quality image to view? Are the settings going to be different for every movie?

2. If the movie I am trying to convert is only in widescreen, is it even possible to convert the movie using handbrake so that it will use the ENTIRE EVO screen when it plays? Or will it have the letterbox no matter what?

2. Is the letterbox standard size for all movies? For instance, when I converted Iron Man it had a pretty good sized letterbox on the top and bottom, and when I converted Wedding Crashers, the letter box was almost half the screen if you added the top and bottom together.

I know there have been a couple of threads on this stuff, I started one of them, but I am still unclear as to how to get the size and quality just right FOR THE EVO screen.

Thanks in advance.
 
Asthmatic Version:
1. Use loose in the aspect ratio settings to help a bit. The settings will be a bit different for every movie if you want a true aspect ratio conversion, depending on the number of source ratios you have in your collection.

2. It is possible, but expect distorted images. Circles will become ovals, etc. Letterboxing is the result of the difference in keeping the original aspect ratio but fitting the whole image into a different aspect ratio. To maintain the original ratio but not letterbox, you usually have to wind up with clipping. Or panning/scanning if you have a lot of time and video editing software on your hands.

2/3. See #2; also, each movie can have a different aspect ratio, so the amount of letterboxing will be different depending on the ratio.

Long winded version:
I'm away from my computer at the moment, so I"m having to go by memory. But, yes, each movie will be different in sizing due to a variety of aspect ratios for DVDs. The larger the ratio, the bigger the letterboxing. If you set the aspect ratio in Handbrake to loose, you can better right-size the image and Handbrake will try to adjust the other size to maintain correct aspect ratio. Unless your source media is 1.66:1 ratio, it'll never fully fill up the screen without cropping or skewing the aspect ratio from the original.

A 1.78:1 translated to 1.66:1 ratio probably wouldn't have too much distortion (ie full-screen 1080p content downsized to EVO size). Larger 2.2+ ratios wil probably be pretty distorted. Oh, and if your source material is 4:3 (a lot of standard definition TV, non-letterboxed), you'll get letterboxing on the sides unless you distort the aspect ratio to 1.66:1. High def TV's do this automatically, depending on preferences.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong about the ratios. I just do waaay more digital video re-encoding than is healthy for an individual not in video production, so I'm not exactly a pro.
 
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So basically I'm screwed, right? ;)

In other words, based on my main question, can you utilize the ENTIRE screen on the EVO, the answer is really no. Unless you are willing to live with distortion of one type or another, right?

That sucks because the picture quality on my Wedding Crashers example is off the charts for a phone, but the damn viewing area is just plain too small to enjoy.

The other thing that sucks is having to change and tweak the settings on EVERY single movie or show. I selected one little section of Iron Man to test on so it would encode quickly, after 8 or 9 copies that didn't really change much, I said to hell with it.

Does anyone know if there are other programs that will do what I'm talking about better than Handbrake or is it simply a problem with screens, aspect ratio's, formats, etc..., that no program will be able to fix?
 
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So basically I'm screwed, right? ;)

In other words, based on my main question, can you utilize the ENTIRE screen on the EVO, the answer is really no. Unless you are willing to live with distortion of one type or another, right?

Right, you can't because movies are in different aspect ratios, so to use the entire screen for most of them, you would have to crop or distort them in some way.
 
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There are two commonly used aspect ratios for film: 1.85:1 and 2.39:1. 1.85:1 is basically 16x9, which for all intensive purposes will fill the evo's screen. So if the movie you have in that ratio is converted to 800 width, while keeping the aspect ratio, it will fill the screen.

For 2.39:1 films, there's a couple options. The easiest way is to just convert to 800 width and keep the aspect ratio again. When you watch on the evo, yes there will be bars on the top and bottom. But, if you haven't noticed, the evo's video player has a zoom button, which will automatically fill the screen. You will of course lose a lot of the picture on the sides, but if you want to fill the screen, thats what you will have to deal with.

The second way to deal with this is to just convert it to full screen, and there's two ways to do this. First, you can keep the aspect ratio, so nothing looks stretched or squished, but it will crop the sides, like the above situation. Just set the width to 800, keep the aspect ratio, but crop off the sides so the videos fills the screen. The second way to do it, is to ignore the aspect ratio and just make it fill the screen. I would not recommend this, as everything will be squished to all hell. To do it, just uncheck keep aspect ratio, and enter 800x480 resolution.
 
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There are two commonly used aspect ratios for film: 1.85:1 and 2.39:1. 1.85:1 is basically 16x9, which for all intensive purposes will fill the evo's screen. So if the movie you have in that ratio is converted to 800 width, while keeping the aspect ratio, it will fill the screen.

Technically 1.85:1 content will have some bars as the EVO aspect based on resolution is actually 1.66:1, but yeah they won't be too big.
 
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