Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: Rich <rich@example.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: What Window Manager/Desktop Environment do you use, and why?
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2025 19:53:03 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
> Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote at 13:00 this Saturday (GMT):
>> "Widescreen" has always been "chasing the movies" because the mouth 
>> breathers can't understand why their latest remake of X has those 
>> black bars on the top and bottom of the picture.
>>
>> 4:3 was the original (way back) movie aspect ratio.  When TV was 
>> created, it copied 4:3 because that's what the movies were set to.  
>> The result was the movies then felt they had to "1 up" to maintain 
>> their reason for being and they became 16:9 aspect.  That was, until 
>> TV's went 16:9 and the movies had then gone "ultra wide" to maintain 
>> their 1 upsmanship.  With the result that the mouth breathers now 
>> have to sometimes contend with black bars on top, or on the sides, 
>> of whatever they are streaming at the moment, depending upon what 
>> year it was filmed.
> 
> Don't forget "fit to screen", the most pointless feature that every 
> media player seems to have for some reason.  Are the black bars 
> seriously so annoying that you would rather completely cut off part 
> of the video??

Yes, for some, they are.  For those who fail to understand why the bars 
are present (and don't bother to learn) they just see it as "the movie 
isn't filling my screen...".  When they hit the "fit to screen" (some 
call it 'zoom' which is a more meaningful name) option, then "the movie 
fills the screen".  And somehow they never ever notice that the edges 
of the movie are no longer visible.  Granted, most directors position 
the "action" in the middle and the far edges usually don't contain 
directly meaningful material to the overall story, so they also are not 
missing anything which would alert them to the fact that the edges have 
disappeared.

Worse are the ones that hit the other button that simply "squishes" the 
whole movie to fit the output device.  So you have either vertical or 
horizontal distortion, or both (depending upon how the movie vs.  
display aspect ratios fit together).  And yet, there they are, watching 
"too wide" or "too narrow" (or too short/too tall) people/things, 
blissfully unaware that the image has been distorted.