I just installed my Media Center Rollup #2. What a silly name, but anyway. There is one feature in MCE Rollup that I have waited 3 years for (I think I was the first person to make this feature request of the team).
What is this feature? They call it Intelligent Zoom. If you have a Widescreen display, like my Plasma, and you watch a lot of TV that is not wide screen, you have a few choices:
- Watch it with grey bars on the sides
- Watch it zoomed in (with the top and bottom cropped)
- Watch it stretched (with the people on TV looking wider)
A lot of TVs like my Plasma also have a mode that uses something called non-linear zoom (Panorama or TheaterMode). Basically it stretches the edges of the screen, and not the center so much, so that the 4:3 picture fills the screen to 16:9 but it looks a lot better than stretch. Since I drive my Plasma via DVI, the fancy Plasma non-linear stretch mode is not available. As such I've been watching 4:3 TV stretched and mostly gotten used to it, but anxiously awaited this feature.
For a good example of what this all looks like, I found a great CNet article on the topic (see Solution 3 for the non-linear zoom or stretch mode).