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Play movies on a widescreen TV from a PowerBook
Authored by: llahsram on May 05, '06 09:01:33AM

It's not the PowerBook that's unfriendly to widescreen, it's the S-Video. All you're going to get out of a composite or S-Video port is a 4:3 picture with 480 lines of resolution (interlaced), whether from a PowerBook, a DVD player, or any other video source. The PowerBook will just scale whatever resolution you've set down to that format. Setting VLC to "Anamorphic" is essentially doing the same thing as an anamorphic DVD, which is a 16:9 picture squished horizontally into 4:3 in order to maximize the horizontal and vertical resolutions. This isn't a feature of the DVD player; the disc is burned that way, and it's up to the TV to stretch the picture back out again.

I don't know about the Titanium PowerBook in particular, but most recent PowerBooks are fully capable of providing a widescreen image to a TV that supports it. You just have to use a VGA, DVI, or HDMI connector, depending on what the display has. I use my MacBook Pro to drive my widescreen TV at 1920x1080 over HDMI and it works wonderfully!

The hint is certainly valuable for when you have a widescreen TV that for some reason only supports S-Video and you want to play videos full-screen, but ideally one wouldn't use S-Video at all with a widescreen display.



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Play movies on a widescreen TV from a PowerBook
Authored by: zane on May 05, '06 04:52:34PM

Oddly, my 3 or so year old ED (enhanced definition, ie: 480p) 16:9 plasma has VGA input, but with only an 800x600 (ie: 4:3) native resolution (or 1024x768 interpolated). So my VGA signals are all 4:3 stretched out to 16:9.

Without yet trying it, I'd say this hint would work well in this situation too, tho I don't know how many widescreen TV's are out there like mine with only 4:3 VGA support.



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