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Hi,

When playing movies on my Panasonic ST60, most movies have black bars at the top and bottom.

The TV has an option to stretch the image vertically but it distorts the image too much.

Is it possible to transcode these movies to 16:9 (even if, some of the picture on the left and right is cropped)?

Thank you

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.

Pressing the Format button and selecting "Sidecut Zoom" should do this, right? (ref: e-help page 33)