[MPlayer-users] Monitor Aspect Ratio

[D Richard Felker III]

On Sun, Oct 19, 2003 at 03:49:27PM +1000, Adam Nielsen wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> > > After hunting through the source code, found the following in
> > > libvo/aspec.c:
> > > float monitor_aspect=4.0/3.0;
> 
> Since this question has come up before, maybe a comment should be added to the 
> effect of:
> 
> /* Default value for -monitoraspect option */
> 
> so that people reading the source would realise what it's for and how to 
> easily change it.

If someone feels they're smart enough to grep the source for
monitor_aspect, they should also realize that it's in cfg-mplayer.h
and thus that it's a command line option... Should we comment every
configurable variable like this? :)

> > Using the physical size from the X server is unacceptable since it's
> > often (at least slightly) wrong, and will mess things up in the (much
> > more common) case where aspect should be exact 4:3.
> 
> For example, I have an old 14" monitor that's 4:3, but in my quest to get as 
> much desktop real estate as possible (with a >= 70Hz refresh rate) it runs at 
> a resolution of 920x512, which, if calculated automatically would yeild an 
> aspect ratio of 1.79:1 (or 16.17:9, a little more than widescreen) instead of 
> the correct ratio of 4:3.  Sure, this is an extreme case, but common 
> resolutions such as 1280x1024 are also not exactly 4:3.

You misunderstand. monitor_aspect is the aspect ratio of the monitor
in physical dimensions, not pixels. So as long as your monitor is
physically 4:3, it doesn't matter what video mode you have it in --
MPlayer will scale the video appropriately to preserve aspect.
monitor_aspect is only needed if you have a strange monitor.

Rich