Getting Full Width on Monitor with MP4 Files

[Wendy]

I just had to get a new monitor with a 16:9 aspect ratio. My old monitors had the square screen and I’m having some difficulty adjusting to this different ratio, though I was assured in another thread here that I’ll get used to it. My question is about MP4 files. The VLC player expands to the full width of the screen. I played an MP4 file and it expanded to the VLC screen width, leaving only a less than 1" black border on each side. I admit this looked much better here than when I played it on my old monitor. But when I play other MP4 files, they don’t expand, leaving about a 4" black border on each side.

Why are the MP4 files playing differently? Is there a way to get all of them to fill the VLC width? I did select “full screen” from the VLC command bar.

The monitor is: HP 22uh

[veeg]

Hello

Hopefully our members will chime in soon.

@phillpower2 @Bruce

[plodr]

Your old monitor displayed in 4:3; the new one in 16:9. You can either use some program to convert the aspect ratio of all mp4 files or open them all in VLC and convert like this
VLC HowTo/Change the aspect ratio - VideoLAN Wiki

There are several programs when you search but I have no idea what is good and what is not. There are also online converters but you’d waste a lot of time uploading, waiting for the conversion then downloading.

[Wendy]

Thanks. I’ll try using the VLC preference.

[jmarket]

Or better still, use Pot Player, it will open videos in their original size or allow you to set any size you want, great multimedia player.

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[Wendy]

I set the VLC aspect ratio. It makes the screen wider but that just stretches the image and makes some distortion in the width of the file playing. It doesn’t make it better to watch the way that one file I played did. So I guess the MP4 files have to be made for this ratio to use it. The one that I played that looked very good must have been made for it.

[Wendy]

I was just playing with some buttons on this monitor. I don’t know what all of these settings do but I saw one that said “Keep Aspect”. The alternative choice was “full screen” so I changed it to that. I played one of the other MP4 files and this time it didn’t look distorted. The black border was shrunk to about 1 1/2" instead of 4". But then I played a second one and this had 3" borders so that’s not much of an improvement. I guess there isn’t any magic setting for playing MP4 files.

And this “full screen” setting makes other text windows much too wide. As the text size is smaller than what I’d want it to be, I may just return this for an older type, squarer monitor. My old monitor had a better size of text.

thank you everyone for your help.