Hi everyone,

I'm in the middle of setting up a home theatre and have a 2.39:1 screen, but a normal 1.78:1 (1920x1080) projector. When playing a 2.39:1 movie all is well; the projection fits the screen because the "overflow" is all black and therefore isn't visible.

However, when I play a 1.85:1 movie, the top and bottom of the picture spill outside the edges of the screen. Does anyone know whether there is a way to tell one of the playback apps to shrink down the content so that it has black bars on all four sides? This will make it fit the screen, with pillarboxing on either side. This means that the effective resolution will only be about 1486x803, but that's a compromise that I'm willing to accept (it won't look any worse than 2.39 content does now).

I've tried using the "aspect ratio" and "crop" features in VLC, but have only managed to distort the video. I'm using OS X and have tried to make it actually output at 1920x800 but it doesn't appear in Sys Prefs - although even if I were successful there's still a chance that the projector would then stretch it back out to 1.78:1 anyway.

I'm possibly going about this all wrong, but short of re-encoding everything with pillarboxes or physically moving the projector closer to the screen I can't find any way of pillarboxing a 1.85:1 movie.

Any suggestions? :)