The VideoLAN Forums

Hi, my main computer broke down so I came back to use my little eee pc windows 7 OS 32 bits 10 inches, and I use the Open in Vlc and Cat Catch extensions to send streaming videos to VLC player and often there are annoying black bars in the videos displayed by VLC, every pixel counts in my small screen of my little eee pc so it is vital for me and surely for others to stretch video and remove black bars, I have tried almost everything : different exotic aspect ratio, zoom, different settings to adapt the video to the cadre window .... nothing worked, the best result was an incorrect zoom which erases the black bars but also erases part of the video .....

We hope our beloved VLC player will add an easy permanent persistent option to stretch videos and remove these black bars, thank you

It's explained in this thread:
https://forum.videolan.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=164531

Great! Thank you very much Mr Lotesdelere for your precious help ! I will try! And sorry for the delay, I did not see your answer, I realize that the VLC forum does not automatically send a notification for each answer, and that we must enable the notifications of each issue ourselves...

Mr Lotesdelere, I followed the advice submitted in the links you posted, I set the aspect ratio to 21:9, used the shortcut c to crop, and tried many other settings, I tried the same video with potpalyer and it's obvious, VLC removes part of the video while potplayer with its "stretch" option removes the black bands without removing part of the video :

https://livetv.sx/frx/showvideo/1387215 ... everkusen/

we hope please a permanent option "disable aspect ratio" which I think will allow VLC to permanently remove the black bands, thanks!

Cropping will remove what you set it too. If you don't set it to remove video, it won't.

If your video is encoded correctly, that is without black bars, you shouldn't set cropping at all. Just adjust the aspect ratio. Though IMO distorting the video looks much worse than having black bars.

Thank you for these explanations Mr Rémi, merci !

yes I think these black bars wouldn't bother me if I had a big screen, but I have a small screen with wide borders and I watch a lot of anime in vostfr so every square centimeter counts for optimal subtitle reading comfort even if the distortion is not very aesthetic, in any case I got used to potplayer's stretch feature, since I need the preview feature of cat catch and open in vlc extensions because the videos lag in the web browser in my old weak eee pc windows 7 os and the preview only works with Potplayer (unfortunately preview video no longer works with VLC) and I think my eyes got used to the stretch or distoriton mode....

i tried many strange many aspect ratio in Vlc... kmplayer has an exotic aspect ratio that removed the black bars, I took the same value and put it in VLC but it didn't work, I think I should change and try other video rendering instead of automatic video rendering chosen by VLC .....

Seriously, no one wants to watch at a stretched video. Black bars are much more acceptable than any image distortion.
Because a movie, a film, a video, is about image first. Respect the work which has been done for making good images.

Yes but i don't think the work is meant to be seen on a small screen, surely it's better to watch on a cinema screen or home tv ....

I saw an option "fit video" frame adjust to window or something like in VLC4 ....
VLC4 suddenly stops working so I can't test streaming videos, will this option stretch the video and will it stay in the much awaited and hoped VLC4? we hope this option will stretch and stay in VLC4 please to give more choices to users

and let's notice zoom of VLC doesn't work in my eee pc windows 7 os, my graphics card has not been updated for a long time, is that the cause of that? it's sad, I would have liked to try different zoom values of VLC ​​:(

and Mr @Lotesdelere, anyway the majority of black bands are light, barely perceptible but still perceptible, removing them or not there is not much difference except on my small 10 inch pc screen, we are talking about 1 cm or less of black bands !

To be clear, I think distorting the video is awful regardless of the monitor size, but that's just my opinion.

If you really want to do that, just leave crop unset (default) and set the aspect ratio to that of your monitor. Beware that the subs may be stretched too which will hurt legibility.

Great ! Thank you for your help !