[MPlayer-users] Re: [-] XV display too wide

[Matthias Wieser]

Hi,
Am Dienstag, 1. Februar 2005 06:20 schrieb D Richard Felker III:
> On Mon, Jan 31, 2005 at 05:04:57PM -0300, Julián Nuñez wrote:
> > Matthias Wieser wrote:
> > >No. Probably 50% of all displays bought in the last year do not have
> > > an aspect ratio of 4:3. More and more notebooks tend to have 15:9
> > > displays and all 17" and 19" TFT displays do have a 4:5 aspect
> > > ratio.
> >
> > Uh, I may be living in another world, but here in Argentina we barely
> > know what TFT displays are. 99.9% of users use 4:3 displays.
>
> i agree totally, and i'm living in the usa. why the hell would i have
> bought a monitor in the past year, or even the past 10 years?

Because an old 14" CRT is dying? 

Btw.: Apple has updated it's line of powerbooks. 4 out of 5 models do not 
have a display aspect ratio of 4:3. ( http://www.apple.com/powerbook/ )

There are at least three options for a media player:
1. Assume 4:3 monitor
2. Assume square pixels
3. Ask X11 about resolution and size of the monitor

The first one only works with certain monitors. The second one works on 
all monitors when the user has selected a sane resolution. The third one 
always works unless the user writes crap into his XF86Config. All 
applications I know of use either option 2 or option 3.


> I assume you mean 5:4, but even that's bad
> because it's horrible for playing movies. 16:9 might be nice, but...

Some people do not exclusively use their monitor for watching movies...

If you would use (for example) a 17" CRT with a resolution of 2000x1000 
pixels, option 3 would work perfectly. Just make sure that your 
XF86Config contains something like
----------------------------
Section "Monitor"
[...]
  DisplaySize  286 216
[...]
EndSection
---------------------------
(you probably already do have a "DisplaySize" entry in your XF86Config, as 
otherwise fonts would have be drawn with wrong DPI)

So option 3 does not have any disadvantage (unless you write something 
like "DisplaySize  286 21645" into your XF86Config) but has the advantage 
that MPlayer does display movies in the correct aspect ratio.

And if someone really does not want to to have correct monitor dimensions 
included in his XF86Config, he can always use --monitor-aspect...

Regards,
   Matthias