New to this UHD but not BluRay rips in general, have questions

[Roxy6315]

I got into the UHD bluray game for Christmas and it's turning out to have its own learning curve, as expected.
My example here is the LOTR extended edition 4K, two discs per movie, six in total.

First issue:
I have successfully ripped all six discs to my hard drive and can watch them, but they have black bars on the top and the sides when I watch them on a 4K display. I expected black bars on top and bottom, after all it's a widescreen movie and not a 16:9 format, and playing the disc on a hardware player (PS5 for now) looks correct, but playing the ripped file on PC with Kodi or VLC I get a zoomed out image.
My solution was to run the "raw" MakeMKV rip through handbrake, which crops the frames top and bottom and then it plays correctly. But, is there a way to have MakeMKV crop the video during the rip? I can tell the video player to zoom in or crop, but I would prefer a foolproof, automatic solution for my family members.
The cropped handbrake version has a frame resolution of 3840x1608.
The MakeMKV version has a frame resolution of 3840x2160, which is exactly the 4K screen resolution, so I have no idea why it displays the way it does. Any tips?

Second issue:
This HDR thing seems to confuse some of my systems. My living room PC plays the MakeMKV version via Kodi with the described crop problem, but the colors are right. The version I ran through handbrake is blue. Not slightly blue, but full on "we only had blue, sorry no other colour except black".
VLC player on the same system does everything right, so it's not like the transcode was faulty. Kodi on another PC with HDR display also doesn't do this, with the exact same files coming from my server.
Not expecting any help on handbrake settings, but I would like to know if the problem is related to how the color space is transmitted between PC and display. Pretty clueless what else could be the cause, since only my living room TV has this problem, and only with this file, not with anything else.

[dcoke22]

I got into the UHD bluray game for Christmas and it's turning out to have its own learning curve, as expected.
My example here is the LOTR extended edition 4K, two discs per movie, six in total.

First issue:
I have successfully ripped all six discs to my hard drive and can watch them, but they have black bars on the top and the sides when I watch them on a 4K display. I expected black bars on top and bottom, after all it's a widescreen movie and not a 16:9 format, and playing the disc on a hardware player (PS5 for now) looks correct, but playing the ripped file on PC with Kodi or VLC I get a zoomed out image.
My solution was to run the "raw" MakeMKV rip through handbrake, which crops the frames top and bottom and then it plays correctly. But, is there a way to have MakeMKV crop the video during the rip? I can tell the video player to zoom in or crop, but I would prefer a foolproof, automatic solution for my family members.
The cropped handbrake version has a frame resolution of 3840x1608.
The MakeMKV version has a frame resolution of 3840x2160, which is exactly the 4K screen resolution, so I have no idea why it displays the way it does. Any tips?

The .mkv file MakeMKV produces is going to be what's on the disc. MakeMKV does not have any functionality to alter the video.

As for the way it displays on your computer monitor, I'd guess that's something to do with your player. I don't really have any experience with Kodi and relatively little with VLC. I would expect if the player is put into full screen mode, it would look correct.

Second issue:
This HDR thing seems to confuse some of my systems. My living room PC plays the MakeMKV version via Kodi with the described crop problem, but the colors are right. The version I ran through handbrake is blue. Not slightly blue, but full on "we only had blue, sorry no other colour except black".
VLC player on the same system does everything right, so it's not like the transcode was faulty. Kodi on another PC with HDR display also doesn't do this, with the exact same files coming from my server.
Not expecting any help on handbrake settings, but I would like to know if the problem is related to how the color space is transmitted between PC and display. Pretty clueless what else could be the cause, since only my living room TV has this problem, and only with this file, not with anything else.

Most all UHDs are in a different colorspace than a regular blu-ray. Handbrake can change the colorspace of a file while it is transcoding it. Did you do that?

Here's a post I wrote recently about colorspaces and UHDs: https://forum.makemkv.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=163176#p163176