FillView and Zoom to Fill

Many films are wider than your TV. A 2.39:1 film on a 16:9 screen plays with black bars above and below the picture. Zoom to Fill in the player crops those bars away so the picture fills the screen, trimming a little from the sides.

The catch is that most files can't tell us where the bars are. A disc remux of a wide film is usually stored as a full 16:9 frame with the bars baked into the picture, and every bit of information in the file says 16:9. The only way to find the real picture is to look at the frames. That's what FillView does: it decodes a short stretch of each file in the background and records where the picture actually sits.

With that measurement, Zoom to Fill crops to exactly the real picture. Without it, the player can't tell a letterboxed film from a true 16:9 one, so the Zoom to Fill button only appears on files where cropping would change something.

Where you'll see it#

Zoom to Fill is in the player controls on Apple TV, iPhone, iPad and Android TV. Press it again (it reads Show Full Picture while active) to go back to the full frame.

Choose how much it measures#

Go to Settings, Scanning, FillView on your server's admin page and pick a mode under Measure files:

• Full library (default): every file is measured shortly after a scan finds it, so Zoom to Fill is ready the first time anyone plays a title.
• On demand: nothing is measured up front. A title is measured the first time somebody plays it, and Zoom to Fill is available from the next play. This saves processor time on big libraries where only some of it gets watched.
• Off: no new measurements. Files already measured keep working.

Changing the mode never deletes measurements that already exist.

What it costs#

Measuring runs at low priority and never delays the start of playback. As a rough guide it takes a few seconds for a 1080p file and around half a minute for a 4K HDR remux, one file at a time. On a large library the first pass can take a few hours, after which only new files need measuring. Progress, pauses and a stop button are shown with the rest of your server's background work.

If your server is a low-power NAS or a laptop, or you rarely use Zoom to Fill, On demand or Off is a sensible choice.