For context I am doing this because of EmuVR. It’s a VR application that allows you to play retro games in an early 2000s bedroom on big CRT TVs. You can also use a VCR to watch movies. The problem I’m running into is a lot of movies/TV shows have been updated to be 16:9 which causes a lot of letterboxing on the 4:3 TVs.
I have tried searching around various torrent and DDL sites with minimal luck. Most of them seem to struggle with recognizing “4:3” as a search term. Adding the term “aspect ratio” seems to help but doesn’t narrow it down completely and only provides a few results.
I am aware of a few individuals like threesixtyp on The Pirate Bay who put out bundles of TV shows and movies in the original aspect ratio but I’m wondering does anyone else had suggestions on how or where I could find this kind of thing? Maybe a site has an advance search section for aspect ratios for example.
I figured some kind of specialty or niche torrent site may have something. I could see something like a best retro movie pack popping up on 4chan’s torrent board.
I am aware I could crop the videos with a program like Handbrake but that would take a decent amount of time to do.
Maybe look for old uploads, or the term “pan and scan”?
A lot of media was actually filmed in a wide aspect ratio for theater, then “pan and scanned” down to 4:3 for home television.
Exactly, it would be more authentic to the time to watch it on 4:3 with black bands.
Search for DVD, or if you are really desperate 480p, and then it’s all about looking at the title and seeing if it gives you more info about if it’s 4:3
This is what I was going to suggest too. It should be pretty effective.
Check your local library. Many of them have DVDs you can borrow. The older ones may be fullscreen. Then you can rip them with Handbrake.
It might be easier to reach out to EmuVR and see if they can update it to crop the videos instead of letterboxing them during playback. I would think someone working on such a project would be receptive of this idea. This also wouldn’t be terribly difficult from a programming perspective.
I think that may not be on them. I think it would be a matter of tweaking the FFmpeg core in RetroArch but I don’t know if it has live video cropping as a feature especially when within the confines of RetroArch. Scaling? Maybe but that’s not really what I’m after.
Searching online I am getting either command line options or unrelated results about CRT gaming.
But it would ruin the framing. Not all shots are framed with the subject dead center.
You might try SDTV or Fullscreen (plus DVD or VHS since those were the last formats that typically offered that aspect ratio regularly) as tags/search terms. I am otherwise unaware of any specific automated search options for 4:3 content. :/
Obviously it would take some work, but you could set up an automated set of scripts that would crop the videos and spit them out as 4:3.
Is there no option within the vr application itself to auto zoom and crop videos to fit the TV?
The problem with the “crop it down” suggestions is that many native 4:3 releases were cropped to be re-released as 16:9… Cropping again to 4:3 would sacrifice even more of the original picture.
Try looking for open matte also. Some open matte versions will have recording equipment visible in some scenes though which might take you out of the movie if you’ve never seen it before https://blog.sporv.com/open-matte-master-list/
