Is there a way to overlay black bars over a movie?

Help and Support
1

Hey, I wondered if you kind folk could help me.

I have a few ‘open matte’ movies and wondered if there was a way in kodi to overlay black bars onto playback (essentially crop it without any aspect ratio changes or zooming) . This is so I could choose whether to watch the movie in its native open matte, or to crop it and watch it in its original theatrical aspect ratio.

Sorry if this is a dumb question, I only have moderate knowledge in such things! I have tried all the options during playback but nothing seems to let me achieve this.

Thank you

2

There is one skin that can do this: ScopeNox (ScopeNox - Aeon Nox for 2.35/Scope Projector Screens (Zoomed CIH))
Our OSMC skin will probably get this functionality at some point, but as it’s a lot of work implementing the feature, I can’t give a time frame. There’s a feature request thread about this here: Willing to add skin for 2.35 scope screen?

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3

Thank you very much for the reply Chillbo, I will check the skin out and will keep an eye on the feature request thread.

4

I tried the skin and the scope mask works great (to adjust the UI to my TV I changed the overscan settings in System settings). But I discovered what I imagined to be the case (comparing the movie Titanic), that simply cropping the open matte does not reproduce the framing of the original aspect ratio framing of the theatrical release. Still, very nice work on the ‘scope mask’ on the skin. Thanks again for the links :slight_smile:

6

I think you may be getting a few things confused here. Matting the screen is something people using projectors would want to prevent a visible picture from spilling off their screen. When using a normal TV screen there should be no need for this as anything pushed off the screen is already not visible.

You can’t just crop an open matte movie and get a reproduction of an original release because there is no information anywhere for it shift the frame to recreate it. If you want a pan and scan version of a movie you have to source a second copy that was made that way.

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7

Thanks for the reply, it’s ok I appreciate the differences here. The ‘scope mask’ was what I was looking for, and it’s seemingly only implemented in a skin designed for projector users (thus I changed the overscan settings to get the UI to fill my normal TV, but this was just a by-the-by). I expected that the theatrical release wouldn’t have simply cropped the taller source, but wanted to try it anyway - it works as expected, and is at least there should I want to use it.