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

[Matthias Wieser]

Am Dienstag, 1. Februar 2005 21:08 schrieb D Richard Felker III:
> On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 01:47:49PM +0100, Matthias Wieser wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Am Dienstag, 1. Februar 2005 06:20 schrieb D Richard Felker III:
> > > 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?
>
> then get a used 17" crt that works for $5 or so at a surplus auction.
> continually consuming more and more resources for the sake of having
> the latest and greatest (actually the most hideously broken, in the
> case of computer gear) stuff is plain stupid.

CRTs are the ones that consume three to four times the electricity of a 
TFT. But probably you do live in a country where electricity is cheap and 
the weather is not to hot.

Sales breakdown between LCD and CRT is roughly 70:30 (->IDC, 2004 
(worldwide)).
~50% of those LC-displays do not have an aspect ratio of 4:3.
On those LCDs MPlayer shows distorted videos.

> > 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/ )
>
> figures it would be an apple user saying these things......

Even non-Apple users know that most apple powerbooks do not have a 4:3 
display.

> > 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)
>
> no, i don't, because adjusting font rendering to physical dpi is
> idiotic.

It's the only sane way to ensure, that a 10pt font is readable, regardless 
if it is shown on a 70dpi CRT, 100dpi CRT, 130dpi TFT, 300 dpi laser 
printer, 1200 dpi laser printer,....

> you should always set dpi to 75 so you can use the bitmap 
> fonts alongside scalable ones, since the bitmap ones look a lot
> better.

That's the reason X11 provides additionally 100dpi bitmap fonts together 
with some good looking TTFs.

> > 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 it only works for x-based vo's.

If the information about the display's dpi is available, it should be 
used. Otherwise squared pixels or a aspect ratio of 4:3 may be a best 
guess.
As probably more people do own a non-4:3 CRT/TFT than there are people 
with 4:3 CRTs but non-4:3 resolutions, the assumption of squared pixels 
should work for more people than an assumed aspect ratio.

> alternatively, people with bogus monitors can put this in their config
> files for mplayer... :)

There are not any "bogus monitors"...
I do know how to configure mplayer, but many other notebook users will 
switch to xine if they see that MPlayer produces egg-heads while xine, 
xawtv, tvtime, vlc,.. do not.

Regards,
  Matthias