Why doesn’t the painting fill up my TV screen? What is Party Mode?

Modified on Fri, 05 Jan 2024 at 04:35 PM

Painters were not painting to fill the frame of a TV screen (see More Info below). The BillionDollarArtGallery is a presentation of great paintings, but many customers have asked for paintings that fill up their screens and that display longer than the software allows on most TVs.

ANNOUNCEMENT 1/5/24

BillionDollarArtGallery has released a new version that also includes 500 paintings cropped for full screen viewing. These images fill any UHD screen and are particularly suited for the Samsung Frame TV.

Click here for more information: https://bdagallery.freshdesk.com/support/solutions/articles/150000171076

Party Mode

We have created a video called Party Mode that crops some wider or “landscape” paintings to full TV size and displays them for 3 minutes each. Party Mode includes no nudes, music or captions, and is designed to provide interesting, full-screen art for over an hour. Party Mode is appropriate to play when you are having a party!

How to Activate Party Mode

Using your TV Remote (or the remote for the device where your BillionDollarArtGallery is installed,) choose videos and then the Party Mode video. Run the video.

Other versions of the BillionDollarArtGallery may store Party Mode in its own directory. Tap the directory and then choose the video file.

More info about filling TV Screens with art

The BillionDollarArtGallery presents history’s most famous paintings on a solid black background to convey the full impact of the art. For instance: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci.

It could be resized to fit the entire screen like this, but that would distort the paintings like this:

Or it could be cropped to show only a portion of the painting, but that would omit much of the detail of the painting:

The same principles apply to landscape (wider format) paintings. It's a math problem:

The TV's aspect ratio is 3180 / 2160 or 1.78.

Imagine that you had a very narrow landscape painting of one foot high by eight feet wide. (Artists actually paint such canvases.) The aspect ratio would be 8 / 1 or 8. You can't show an aspect ratio of 8 on a screen of 1.78 without adding black bars to the top and bottom. Alternatively, you could crop out of the middle of long painting: you would show the section that is 1 feet tall by 1.78 fee wide -- only 1.78 feet of the 8 feet, which would hardly represent the painting.

Here is an actual example from the BillionDollarArtGallery:

We could crop the painting to fit the screen, but you would lose the sides of the painting -- and part of the feeling of desperation that this image conveys.

The BillionDollarArtGallery presents the full art, but we recognize that some people want to fill their screens with compelling images, which is why we created Party Mode. It fills the screen with a selection of wide paintings that are cropped to fill the full screen, and each image is displayed for 3 minutes.