[RESOLVED with 1.3.5.4] Paramount+ 1.3.5.3 Beta issues thread

[num1cboysfn]

Thanks for this guys My issue is resolved!! AnyStream for the win again. Thanks for all the hard work.

 

[walstib]

1920x960 and 1920x1080 are the same quality. They are both full HD. Prime just removes the black bars from the top and bottom. The black bars add nothing and unless you are trying to burn to bluray they are not needed. Whenever I use Handbrake to encode my blurays I always remove the black bars. The files come out smaller and the quality is the same.

Edited to remove what may have been perceived as unintended snarkiness.

if removing black bars changes the aspect ratio eg by zooming then you are losing picture, no?

basically if the end result is to fill a 16:9 screen without black bars then either the source is stretched or it is zoomed or both

how does black bar removal actually work?

 

[Joseph.]

Nope. With the merger all that content is going to move to a combined platform with HBO Max so whatever that ends up being will likely be updated in AS. That will be a while before the merger finishes. There's no sense at all putting any effort into Discovery+ before that happens.

Until the day I can have it in AS I will continue to use it in SF to get my Discovery videos. Thanks!

 

[sycor]

if removing black bars changes the aspect ratio eg by zooming then you are losing picture, no?

basically if the end result is to fill a 16:9 screen without black bars then either the source is stretched or it is zoomed or both

how does black bar removal actually work?

It doesn't zoom the picture. When you have a 1920x1080 picture with black bars and a 1920x960 without, all that was done was cropping the black bars out. This can result in smaller file sizes but still the same quality. Here's an example. You can see the side to side is the same. The top to bottom is all there too, with the exception the black bars. When you play the video through something like Plex (and most all other modern video players) if there are no black bars at the top and bottom, it will add them back for playback so you still get the full resolution side to side picture. But the black bars do not have to be encoded to the file.

Now, there is nothing wrong with having the black bars there either. It can just result in a slightly larger file size. And then it will force whatever you are using for play back to use the black bars. In rare instances this can result in a movie having black bars added to the sides so that it doesn't take up the entire picture left to right. But that is rare. Like say the actual picture is 16:9 and then the black bars shift it something else. Your TV or video playback software COULD add black bars on the sides so the picture isn't as large on the screen. But again, this is very, very, very rarely going to happen.

And lastly, just to mention, you just have to be careful with cropping the black bars on some movies. Occasionally a movie that uses interspersed IMAX format images (think Dark Knight) the cropping COULD result in those scenes being cropped too as handbrake doesn't distinguish. It just figured out where the black bars are at the beginning of a movie and crops the entire movie.

BUT, all of that said, 1920x1080 and 1920x960 are still both full HD, as long as the 960 just had the black bards removed. I have come across some older movies on AS which are supposed to be 1280x720 but instead of doing a full HD restore, the studio decided to just zoom in the picture some and while yes it is 1280x720, but you are not getting the actual full image. But that is not something I've seen very often and it's almost exclusively on old content, like 70s and 80s movies.