Fri Apr 25, 2014 12:30 pm by atc98092
Those videos apparently have an aspect ratio higher than 1.78:1. Most likely 2.35:1, which is what a lot of movies were shot in. I don't believe there's any practical method of an on the fly crop as you suggest. As you've already noted, using the TV's stretch function distorts the image. And any cropping should be done by hand, to ensure you don't remove something vital to the scene you are watching.
Remember too, even if your video was cropped to eliminate the bars (as you note by cropping either or both sides), while the resultant image would appear larger you would not see any better resolution. The image only has enough pixels to fill the screen with the black bars above and below. The cropping method removes some of those pixels, and they don't get moved to the top and bottom. In fact, unless your video is already HD it is possible the modified image would look worse than you start with. Even with HD, it will still lose resolution.
Dan
LG NANO85 4K TV, Samsung JU7100 4K TV, Sony BDP-S3500, Sharp 4K Roku TV, Insignia Roku TV, Roku Ultra, Premiere and Stick, Nvidia Shield, Yamaha RX-V583 AVR.
Primary server: Intel i5-6400, 16 gig ram, Windows 10 Pro, 22 TB hard drive space | Test server Windows 10 Pro, AMD Phenom II X4 965, 8 gig ram
HOWTO: Enable debug logging HOWTO: Identify media file contents