Question Try watching 1931 4:3 movie on my TCL Roku 43" TV/Monitor using Manavox 4K player, aspect ratio terrible

[Muse]

I tried everything for over an hour. Couldn't get the picture to look decent and finally gave up, put the disk in my LG external DVD player and watched on this Lenovo P1 Gen 1 laptop using VLC media player and it automatically chose the right aspect ratio, no problem. Why in the devil couldn't I get a decent picture using those two pretty newish components?

Magnavox MBP6700P 4K / Blu-ray / DVD upscaling player

TCL 43S405 43" 4K TV/Monitor

The TV only had settings like Normal, Zoom, etc. None of them would provide a picture with black vertical bars left and right.

The Magnavox player had a variety of settings and none of them looked any good. They cut off the top/bottom of picture or distorted the image.

Magnavox settings:

Setup/Video/TV display:
4:3 Normal
4:3 Crop
16:9 Widescreen
16:9 Squeeze

HDMI video:
Auto
480p
720p
1080i
1080p
4K

Auto and 480p didn't cut it.

I just can't believe that the manufacturers of these devices have no way of watching a 4:3 movie acceptably.

I was trying to watch Charlie Chaplin's City Lights. But 16x9????? No bueno.

 

[Viper GTS]

To get a proper answer on this we need to know the exact version of the film you are watching. DVD vs Blu-Ray, the exact release version details.

Without knowing this I would venture a guess that the presentation of the now uncommon aspect ratio (1.13 apparently) is not handled in a standard way on the disc. They probably didn't pillar box it to 4:3. VLC plays it fine because it's just pixels and VLC knows how to deal with arbitrary resolutions just fine.

This is much less of an issue than it used to be now that 16:9 televisions are the industry standard, but it doesn't surprise me at all that you'd have issues with a weird aspect ratio.

Viper GTS

 

[Lopoetve]

This used to happen a lot when they "faked" widescreen resolutions in a 4:3 letterbox, rather than having a full 16:9 actual feed. I had a couple of discs back in the day (been a LONG time) that were that way - "widescreen" versions to be displayed on an old 4:3 TV, rather than an actual 16:9 TV. VLC is smart enough to do that, but not everything is.

 

[Muse]

I determined that it was just impossible to display that particular disc properly on my 43" 4K TCL Roku TV/monitors. I borrowed a different issuing of the same movie from my local library and it does display properly on the monitors, it was Criterion 2013.

 

[Lopoetve]

Criterion fixed all the discs they issued. Glad you got it fixed.