[MPlayer-users] Monitor Aspect Ratio

[Doug Carman]

I have been working on compiling MPlayer 1.0pre1 for the Dell Inspiron
8500 laptop.  The system is running RedHat 9, and has the ATI Radeon M9
chipset with the wide aspect ratio 330mm x 210mm LCD display.

This configuration requires a custom mode line in the XF86Config file to
support 1680x1050 resolution, and requires the option DisplaySize to be
set to "330 210".

While viewing a DVD, I noticed that the aspect ratio was wrong when
viewing full screen, but appeared to be correct when viewing in a window.

After hunting through the source code, found the following in libvo/aspec.c:

float monitor_aspect=4.0/3.0;

This appears to hard code the monitor aspect ratio to 4:3 regardless of
what the hardware might actually be.  While changing monitor_aspect to
3.3/2.1 solves my problem, I have to believe that there is a better way to
do this either by using the XFree configuration or at least making it a
configurable parameter.  More and more new systems are making the
assumpion of a 4:3 aspect ratio incorrect.

Other than this issue, I am happy to say that MPlayer 1.0pre1 works
impressively well on this system and provides exceptional DVD playback.


--
Doug Carman
pdp11 AT bellsouth DOT net