Re: [gentoo-user] [OT] Best video player

[Nick Rout]

On Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:47:46 +0100
Hemmann, Volker Armin wrote:

> On Tuesday 15 November 2005 15:48, Peper wrote:
> > Hello,
> > what's the best video player in your opinion?
> >
> > --
> > Best Regards,
> > Peper
>
> xine with xine-ui
>
> mplayer is nice too, but while xine is able to save the correct aspect ratio
> while resizing, mplayer only has 100%, 200% and fullscreen. (if it does show
> the coorect aspect ratio, it is well hidden - and something well hidden does
> not count).

I am not sure that you are at all correct. With mplayer I can resize a
window with my mouse and the aspect is retained (ie i drag the window
wider and it also gets taller). There are certainly no restrictions like
100/200% - any size seems to work.

And aspect seems to work well when resizing to fullscreen too. If it is
in some form of letterbox (eg 16:9) you get black lines above and below,
just as expected.

Some media formats (avi?) have a place in the header to specify aspect
ratio, whereas others seem to leave it to the player to guess from the
frame size. If the header doesn't specifiy then the player can get
confused, but mplayer has the -aspect switch which seems to fix this on
the rare occasion that it is an issue. And it is not well hidden,
searching the man page for "aspect" turns it up. 

I see that there is also a switch called "-nokeepaspect":

-nokeepaspect
 Do not keep window aspect ratio when resizing windows.  Only works with the x11, xv, xmga, xvidix, directx video
 output drivers.  Furthermore under X11 your window manager has to honor window aspect hints.

Maybe this is turned on in your machine?

Check /etc/mplayer.conf (system wide) and ~/.mplayer/*

-- 
Nick Rout <nick@×××××××.nz>

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