Hotshot video conversion resolution? No full screen ever?

I have the Pantech Hotshot. The screen resolution of the phone is 400wide x 240high. When I convert a video to that resolution the phone always reduces it to 320 wide instead of filling the screen to the 400 wide and makes the 240 high even smaller. If I convert the video to a larger size it makes the video on screen even smaller. The only video resolution that works decent is 320x240 which fills the screen top to bottom but leaves black bars right and left. If its the phone software that's doing it than what's the point of having a screen 400x240 if you can never view a video in that screen filling resolution? And the video player has no option to zoom or fill the screen. What is the best resolution to convert a video to view on this phone to fill the screen completely like every phone I've ever had was able to do? Thanks

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Cybershocked

Ok, I fingered this out myself. The best Resolution to convert to for the Pantech Hotshot is indeed the 400x240 Res of the screen itself. Its been awhile since I've done any video editing and conversions and I completely forgot to check the settings in my conversion software. Most video editing and conversion programs have a setting that allows you to set format as "Original, 4x3, 16x9, Letterbox, Zoom, Full Screen, etc..." I forgot to set to Zoom or Full Screen or 16x9 (which ever looks better) so that the end result will fill the screen completely. If "Format" setting is left at "Original" or "4x3" when converting to mp4, then no matter what Res you set it will not be allowed to stretch and fill the screen. Nothing wrong with the phone software, it was my fault. My memory is actually very good, its just short.

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Cybershocked

MojaveMoon_

"The screen resolution of the phone is 400wide x 240high. When I convert a video to that resolution the phone always reduces it to 320 wide instead of filling the screen to the 400 wide and makes the 240 high even smaller. If I convert the video to a larger size it makes the video on screen even smaller."

I think you have not found the solution to your situation. We have a non-smartphone (Samsung u370) that, like your phone, has a screen resolution of 400x240 and, like your phone, seemingly won't play a video at the correct resolution when the video is a resolution that exceeds 320x240.

On this u370 phone while playing a video, there are icons on the screen one of which looks like an "X" with arrows at the end of each of the ends of the "X". Tapping this icons causes the video player to expand the video so that now it's playing at the full horizontal resolution of 400.

The video player on our flip phones works the same way. Our LG vx8370 has a 320x240 screen. When I play a 320x240 video, initially the video players plays the video at a resolution of 240 x something. When I push up on the directional pad, then the phone expands the video and then plays it at 320x240.

One more thing. My experience on two different Verizon non-smartphones is the same when it comes to playing widescreen videos -- when I play a video of a resolution such that I have to select the option to expand the video so that the video is playing at the full horizontal resolution of the video, the video player won't show the correct vertical resolution of the widescreen video. Instead, the video player stretches the video to fill the vertical resolution of the phone's screen. While that is tolerable to me for a 16x9 video, my preference is that I find a stretched 2.35:1 video to look unwatchable. The only way that I can preserve the aspect ratio of the widescreen video is to use a video conversion tool that lets me pad the video with blank lines. FFmpeg and mencoder are two tools that have this padding option. So this is what I came up with. Suppose I have a 16:9 widescreen video. The video would need to be about 400x224. Since the video player software on the Verizon non-smartphones will play incorrectly by showing a video stretched to fill the whole screen, I'll need to use the padding command in ffmpeg and add 16 blank lines -- 8 lines above the video and 8 lines below the video. The ffmpeg command for that is

scale=400:224,pad=400:240:0:8

ffmpeg will scale the video to 400x224. The pad command tells ffmpeg that the converted video will have a total of 240 vertical lines of which 224 are the video and 16 of which are blank lines. The "8" tells ffmpeg how to center the video -- there'll be 8 lines above the video and 8 lines below the video.

Since ffmpeg uses a command line interface, two free graphic user interfaces for ffmpeg that I like are Avanti and Pazera:

http://www.videohelp.com/tools/Avanti

http://www.pazera-software.com/products/audio-extractor/

Pazera uses an older version of ffmpeg which can be updated after installing pazera by, if I remember correctly, just deleting the older ffmpeg file and replacing it with the new one.

Cybershocked

Bro, check it,

I just got through converting several music videos and a few movies and all of them now fill the screen perfectly to all edges. The Pantech Hotshot has a basic video player with no way to adjust the screen as on many smart phones and multimedia players. As I wrote in my reply post, if I leave the default setting on my conversion program (Aimersoft Video Converter Ultimate v4) to Zoom: "Keep Original" instead of Zoom: "Pan&Scan" or "Full Screen" any and all 4:3 videos will not fill the wide screen even if its converted to 400x240. It stays 4:3. But if I make sure the Zoom setting is set to Zoom: "Pan&Scan" or "Full Screen" or "16:9" then the video with the original 320x240 4:3 format is allowed to be stretched or zoomed up a little during the conversion process so it becomes a 400x240 wide screen format video that perfectly fills my 400x240 screen. It basically zooms the video up just enough to fill the right and left so it appears you're seeing a widescreen video but its really the same 4:3 video slightly zoomed up. The same way our widescreen LCD TV's slightly zoom up a non widescreen program to look widescreen.

Btw, I'm familiar with the prog you're using, I used to use it years ago. A much easier way is what I described using any number of retail and a few good freeware video converters. It does cut a little off the top and bottom just like a widescreen TV will do to fill its widescreen but there is usually very little at the very top and bottom of most videos/movies to be a big deal.

pantechuser

I have found a great website that you can convert pretty much any files to a different file type in browser. This website has work great for me when i need to change a picture file type or video from mpeg2 to mp4. The website also allows you to resize videos and images as well. This website is http://www.online-convert.com.

unknown

@Antivzw. Cool that's meet i can use this site on my smartphones. Thanks