Bright Black Bars in DV Remuxes

When watching DV rips in pitch black you notice a very faint black bar glow on scope movies on a C1 OLED. The bars are very faint, the slightest light you won't see them and often times it's your peripheral vision that's more sensitive to luminance that picks up on it.

I'm on v6.3.41, the latest official on the website. I can see from previous threads this was supposed to be fixed. So wondering what the issue might be or if it's the forum's firmware releases that have resolved it.

I don't have this issue with any other DV sources over HDMI. I've verified true black DV test patterns also and my display has been calibrated by HDTVTest

 

There are two sources of so called black bars in no 1.78:1 presentations:

1. When the video file itself is a a standard 1.78:1 aspect ratio (3840x2160 for UHD, 1920x1080 for FHD, 1280x720 for HD) but the original presentation is 2.35:1, 2.39:1 or 2.40:1 (also 1.85:1, 2.20:1)

In this case, the black bars are part of the encoded video so of course if the black bar levels are raised, levels are raised in the whole video which would either indicate a calibration issue or a wrong setting - for example HDMI luminance range.


2. When the video resolution is natively the same as the original presentation, in other words it has been cropped - so for 2.40:1 for example, the video is 3840x1600 for UHD, 1920x800 for FHD and 1280x533 for HD.

In this case, for display, the video layer is overlaid on a black background layer that's generated by the player.


In the second case, there was an issue with the Zidoo dating back to the early days where that background layer video level was raised slightly presenting exactly the symptoms you describe.

This has been fixed in later firmware, so I suggest grabbing the latest beta.

As I say, this issue is only relevant to cropped video, so if you see it with non cropped video you need to look at your settings, but I'm pretty sure it's an issue caused by case 2 above.

 

Thanks for the detailed response - makes perfect sense now. Will try the new beta firmware on the next movie night