Sunday 31 January 2016

Constant Image Height Projection - No Zooming

Having replaced my trusty old Sony 1271QM CRT projector with a shiny new JVC X500R digital model, I wanted to display a range of movie formats on my 139" Seymour AT based DIY 2.35:1 aspect screen with minimum of fuss.

Typically, this is achieved either by using a costly and cumbersome anamorphic lens or by setting up lens memories on the projector which are recalled manually based on the input resolution.
Here's a video showing how I set up my system to have a constant height setup based on HTPC source with JRiver Media Centre 21 software for SD and HD material without any need for anamorphic lenses, zooming or pfaffing about with lens memories.





This is made possible by the fact that the projector accepts input resolutions up to 4K (native 3840 x 2160), allowing for content up to 1080p to happily display on screen.

In fairness, with JVC this is a bit of a fudge in that the projector panels are only 1080p but their proprietary e-shift technology shifts pixels to enable pseudo 4K. In practice, this works really well. This technique would work with any of the e-shift enabled JVC projectors or indeed any 4K native units.

For each of the resolutions up to 1080p, the PC scales the content up to a max height of 1634 as follows shown below. While this doesn't maximise the full pixel height of the projector like an anamorphic lens or zoom solution would, it's still significantly more pixels than are available in the source material and looks pretty good to me.



Here's a useful link to madVR config in Jriver: http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=80253.0

Here are the projector settings, for reference;









4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can you feed the video output of another source, like DirecTV through the media center so it too is displayed correctly? Thanks

MediaServer8 said...

I don't have any video inputs on my htpc so, no. I believe there are Hdmi input cards for PCs but I've never used them. This would indeed help the October behave more like a pre/pro but I have no need for this, if I had an additional device, I'd plug it in to the 2nd Hdmi input on the projector.

Anonymous said...

I admire what you have done here. I like the part where you say you are doing this to give back but I would assume by all the comments that this is working for you as well.
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MediaServer8 said...

Hi @revosoft. Thanks for the kind words. Comments such as your own encourage me to continue posting.