Important note: This does work in Windows Vista and 7, but probably won’t work in XP being that OS sometimes has issues displaying video across multiple monitors.

Recently I posted a video about to use Direct3D Desktop Mode for multi-monitor VLC video play. The problem however is that when you span video across multiple monitors, you’re going to see huge black bars on either end of the picture.

The way around this is to force VLC to use a custom crop ratio. This works whether you have monitors of the same resolutions or not.

I have two monitors of differing sizes/resolutions. One is 20-inch/1680×1050 and the other a really old 17-inch/1280×1024. How I was able to get picture across both monitors with no black bars was to do the following:

Getting the proper aspect ratio for cropping

There are two ways of going about this:

1. Using the Aspect Ratio calculator.

2. Adding horizontal resolutions of both monitors, using largest vertical for vertical figure.

Using my setup as an example for #2 above:

Monitor 1: 1680×1050
Monitor 2: 1280×1024

Monitor 1 horizontal + Monitor 2 horizontal = 2960
Monitor 1 has largest vertical area: 1050

The cropped aspect ratio that will fill up both monitors is 2960:1050. Alternatively, 296:105 can also be used because if both figures have zeroes on the end, they can be omitted.

Adding in the custom crop ratio to VLC

VLC has the ability to use any custom aspect ratio you want, however where to do this is buried.

First you go to Tools > Preferences.

At bottom left, tick All:

At top left, click Video (highlight, don’t expand):

In the Custom crop ratios list, I enter my value here:

Close and restart VLC. The new custom settings won’t be available until you do this.

Playing video and enabling the custom crop ratio

Start playback, then click Video > Direct3D Desktop mode:

At this point the multi-monitor works, but there are huge black bars on either side:

Right-click the screen, then choose Video > Crop, and select the custom aspect ratio:

End result:

The picture takes up the entire area of both monitors. Mission successful.

Drawbacks

The single largest drawback is that there is picture cut off from the top and bottom. However for most movies this isn’t too much of a bother.

For the movie I used, this is the original:

…and this is with the crop ratio enabled:

It goes without saying that results vary from movie to movie (some will look fine across multiple monitors while others will look terrible), and that this only works well with movies and not 4:3 television shows.

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