It makes me jealous that the iPhone can fill the screen to play movies, while my Nokia N95 8GB and other Nseries phones can’t. Until they add this feature, here’s a workaround to view movies full screen. It requires cropping some pixels off the sides of the movie. I’ll share a math formula, so I hope your algebra and calculator skills are still fresh.

Fullscreen Versus Widescreen on the Nokia N95 8GB

I’ll be using VisualHub for the conversion, but the formula will also work in other encoding software that lets you crop videos.

Step 1. Write down the size of the original movie file. For this example, we’ll use the Hancock trailer downloaded from Apple’s website. It is 848 x 448 pixels resolution. 848 is the width (W) while 448 is the height (H) of the video.

Step 2. Use this formula to find how much to crop from the left and right sides of the movie: X = (W – 1.33H) / 2. For our example, the answer is 126.08 pixels.

Step 3. Round X down to the nearest even number. So 126.08 will be rounded down to 126 pixels.

Step 4. I’ll use VisualHub and follow my previous post on How To Convert Videos To Nseries Using VisualHub. Under the advanced settings, enter what we found as X and the resolution of our phone which is 320 x 240 pixels. Since we are already in advanced settings, let’s also check deinterlace and the Two-pass options for improved picture quality.

Copy these advanced settings for VisualHub for fullscreen video.

Step 5. That’s it. Convert the video and we’ll have a full screen video to enjoy on our phone.

It sucks that I have to go through this workaround while it only requires one press on the iPhone’s screen to get the same desired result. Some people prefer the widescreen, but my argument here is that the option should at least be available to us.