is it better to have it on stretch or zoom?

what do post proccessing #1 & #2 do?

what does soften do?

i have my screen calibrated at 40,32 -40,-32

videos seem ok but some dont look right.

I don't think there's one "best" setup for everyone. Alot of it is personal preference what equipment you have and how it's calibrated. For me, I don't use soften or the post processing options(because I can't figure out what they do). As for screen calibration, I set it at the visible edges of my TV. I'm running a 27" set with S-Video that has been calibrated with AVIA guide to Hom theater so even fairly poor quality videos look very nice full screen. All in all, I'm amazed at just how well done the XBMP is. As far as what settings are best, I don't think there's one "best" for everyone.

From what I know "post processing" does the extra processing that DIVX may have been encoded with (global motion compensation, quarter pixel etc). It will only be noticable if the movie was encoded with the extra options turned on though. "Soften" just does a softening filter over the whole screen to help hide aliasing and pixelation (also often found on expensive DVD players).

I have both post processing options on as well as the soften filter. No need to turn post processing off though as it just wont happen anyway if the movie wasnt encoded for it. As far as soften, i have this on all the time - the only time this is worth turning it off is if its a SUPER hi-qual Divx/Xvid or you often do DVD playback within XBMP, in that case turn soften off if you want a slightly sharper picture.

The reason I keep soften turned off is because after calibrating my TV with Avia, my sharpness is set at 0 and my brightness/contrast as set as reasonable levels. So on my TV soften seems to just make the picture blurrier. I barely see pixels even on fairly low quality files so I leave soften off unless the video is of just godawful quality.

I don't use zoom or stretch (except for SVCDs, since those are 480x480). I first calibrated the screen so the corners were just invisible (3 clicks past visible I think), and then picked a video and started playing it, and I paused it and went to the settings menu. I then adjusted the aspect ratio error (the last number on the right in parenthesis - at least that's what I think it is) to as close to zero as I could get it, and every movie has had the correct aspect ratio since then...