Potplayer Remove Black Bars

[Melanie Wendelberger]

Letterboxingis when black bars appear at the bottom and top of your video. Pillarboxing is when black bars appear on the left and right sides of your video. Read on to learn how to remove unwanted black areas.

If you notice what appears to be pillarboxing when you visit your video's clip page on vimeo.com, note that this page's design includes black on either side of the player. The screenshot below includes a video uploaded with a 16:9 aspect ratio; the black on either side is not from the video itself, it's from the page design.

You can confirm whether the black bars exist in your video by checking the video's edit page from your Library or by checking the embedded player. If you see black bars in either of those environments, then the pillar or letter bars exist either within your video or due to your video's aspect ratio in comparison to the player.

I have been dabbling in the video recording, editing and publishing field lately. One of the latest things that I had to get my head around was a black bar problem on YouTube. Depending on the original video that you upload, you may see black bars horizontally or vertically. That's pretty bad for the viewing experience in my opinion. Problem is: Since you have already uploaded the video, you might not want to re-reprocess it locally to update it again. Especially not if the current video has already received comments, views or links.

YouTube has added commands to the video hosting platform to correct the aspect ratio of already uploaded videos. While the end result won't be as pretty as re-processing the video, it will save the director the troubles of doing that.

Take a look at the following two screenshots. The first shows a video that I have recently uploaded to YouTube. It has black bars on the right and left. The second screenshot shows the same video after making the changes on YouTube. It is now stretched. The bars are gone.

Just copy and paste the commands into the tags text box and click Save Changes afterwards. Re-open the video on YouTube and watch how the tag modified the aspect ratio. You may need to reload it once or twice for that. If you are not happy with the result go back and use another tag or remove the existing one.

The options to crop or stretch videos will usually not result in optimal videos. Videos may look to stretched or important parts of the video may be missing if you have selected to crop it. In that case, you may have no other choice but to process it again on your local computer.

if video uploaded by someone other so how can we directly download a video without this black bars is any method of this..? cuz mostly we found some videos which really look so bad with this bars so how can we remove..?

Please can you check if you have Enhanced Sync enabled under Radeon Settings > Gaming > Global Settings? Enhanced Sync can cause some corruption or flickering in 2D applications. You may be required to add the media player to Radeon Settings as an application profile and set Enhanced Sync to disable.

Enhanced sync is disabled globally. The last known working driver version is 18.12.1.1. Short of reverting to that, you either have to disable Freesync entirely or use a D3D exclusive fullscreen mode if the video player supports that. These are only workarounds though. There's another thread about the issue here:

Thanks for that. What I find very strange is that the D3D full screen mode works fine and that disabling Freesync completely fixes the problem. Ordinarily I'd just switch applications, but MPC-BE specifically is really good at tonemapping HDR content to SDR. Hardly touches the CPU.

I did not see this possibility mentioned so sorry if you have tried this. I have had a couple monitors now that FreeSync does not work correctly on unless you load the proprietary monitor driver. Most people just plug an monitor in and Windows loads a Generic PNP driver. This driver does not always have what it needs to make all features work. Especially if they update things after launch.

I noticed your monitor does have a driver from LG available. It may not help or change anything but would be worth checking out and trying. LG 29UM67-P.AUS: Support, Manuals, Warranty & More LG USA Support

Please note that Windows after updates has a habit of reverting those drivers back to the Generic so if this helps then the problem comes back make sure to load the correct driver again. Even if it doesn't help this problem, you often need these drivers for sleep to work as it should.

Not at all, appreciate you posting. Unfortunately I have already tried this. Though it must be said that way back when the AMD windmill demo was still a reliable way of checking whether Freesync is working, in the early days of Windows 10, the driver was actually necessary. Makes zero difference now though. Freesync works fine in games.

Is there any way this could be investigated further? More reports of this behaviour keep coming in. It seems at the moment to be monitor related, with a number of additional LG ultrawide displays being mentioned. There's still no mention of it in the known issues, which after 7-8 months is a little concerning.

The standard Freesync range of my 29" Ultra wide LG monitor is 40 - 75 Hz. This is not enough for LFC to work. With these settings and Freesync on, I get a lot of tearing while watching videos. I have used a tool to increase the range to 30 - 75 Hz in the past, and I forgot to do it this time after my latest driver update. It was quite to coincidence that I now have tearing. So guess what. After I increased the range again, I now no longer have tearing while watching videos! And that extended range I set is the exact range where LFC is supposed to work perfectly at.

Now, understand that extending your range like I did can damage your monitor or decrease its life significantly. I don't know if I'm one of the lucky ones, or if the majority of LG monitors can work with this extended range without any issues. You can try it at your own risk.

Most likely, the framerate of the video is not being doubled with Freesync enabled while LFC is not working, and therefore falls well outside of the Freesync range, causing tearing. Either that, or it is tripled or quadrupled rather than doubled, or something else is going on that only AMD can figure out.

- Turn on AMD Fluid Motion Video (Video Tab on the bottom between the Gaming and ReLive tab, then select custom to enable it). This should insert additional frames, technically increasing the framerate to fall within your Freesync range.

Thanks for posting this. There is definitely something to it; 60fps video seems to play back normally which would indeed support the notion that LFC is simply broken. I'll look into extending the range to see if that works as temporary solution.

No joy with either forcing vsync or AMD Fluid Motion Video; I tested those a while back.

Your solution to this works. I've just tested CRU and expanded the Freesync range and like magic, the problem is gone. I wish I'd done this 18 months ago! There's some confusion in the other thread due to a Dunning-Kruger nutcase hijacking it (Enabling Freesync causes screen tearing and motion judder when playing videos) but apparently Freesync shouldn't be running at all during video playback; what's strange is that forcing an override to force disable it doesn't work.

But anyway, thanks for your post. You're the only one to have actually narrowed the problem down.

same here, win version 1903, RX480, same monitor, 19.6.3 drivers, I solved it using bluesky Frame Rate Converter. Freesync is working properly because I have no problems in game. Enhanced Sync is disabled for global settings, and is a fresh windows installation.

Also I noticed that only MPC and Potplayer has problem with that, is not a problem in Windows Media player that comes with windows 10, and not a problem in videos over chrome. Bluesky frame rate converter totally fix it with fluid motion video enabled in AMD drivers. I am still testing and I downloaded a video to test tearing (just bars moving around at different speed). So far the problem only appears in Potplayer and MPC HC. going to check more video players.

The built-in Films & TV player in Windows 10 used to have the problem prior to the release of W10 1903, but it works fine now.

If you switch to the exclusive fullscreen mode in MPC-HC (it's under presentation settings, D3D fullscreen mode) or MPC-BE (Renderer settings / Presentation / Exclusive fullscreen) you can workaround the problem without the need for Bluesky. It works here at least, but it makes for extremely sluggish transitions.

Windowed mode is fine here too.

yeah. same with potplayer if you use fullscreen, and it doesn't use the color profile either. I am trying VLC and has no problem, this is definitely a problem with potplayer and MPC HC in fullscreen only (not true fullscreen), and you can notice that the initial 2 seconds (or one) there is no tearing, something kick in after 1 or 2 second causing tearing. You can try better if you download a youtube video to test screen tearing (there is one with black and white bars.

I am trying to check windows trash like the new freature with variable refresh rate, tried 60hz (instead of 75hz), also disabling full screen optimization. Nothing works yet. But well, I mostly use blue sky because I love to watch things in 60fps with fluid motion, and there is no problem with netflix or youtube, or any webplayer. Is pretty strange issue... and it happens in both of my windows installations, with different drivers and windows versions.

I have this exact problem. Sapphire RX 480 on a LG Ultrawide 29'' with Freesync (75hz). Movies have a noticeable tearing line on the top third of the screen. Happens on MPC-HC, VLC and PotPlayer. You'd think watching a 1080p movie would be flawless in 2019... guess not.

Can someone from AMD please acknowledge this problem? This is a serious issue, I will not get an AMD card again when I upgrade my RX 480 if something as basic as watching a movie doesn't work properly...

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