[MPlayer-users] Embedding video aspect in mpeg1

[Giacomo Comes]

On Fri, Nov 11, 2005 at 08:02:37AM +0800, Heimdall Midgard wrote:
> 2005/11/11, Giacomo Comes <comes at naic.edu>:
> > On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 06:19:14AM +0800, Heimdall Midgard wrote:
> 
> [snip]
> 
> > > I am using MPlayer dev-CVS-051107-08:26-4.0.3.
> 
> But I did mention it ;-).

Sorry, I probably was blind in that moment :)

> 
> > mencoder will usually set the appropriate aspect ratio
> > for mpegs (except for a couple of uncommon configurations)
> > and 4/3 and 16/9 aspects always work.
> > (well, I'm talking about releases, I use CVS less often and I
> > don't know if recently CVS did break something. You didn't
> > mention what version of mplayer you are using).
> >
> >
> > MPlayer will display something like this when you play the mpeg:
> >
> > VIDEO:  MPEG1  352x240  (aspect 2)  29.970 fps  1152.0 kbps (144.0 kbyte/s)
> > and
> > Movie-Aspect is 1.33:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
> > VO: [xv] 352x240 => 352x264 Planar YV1
> >
> > If that is what you have, then the mpeg aspect IS fine and
> > the problem is somewhere else.
> 
> Yes, MPlayer displays the correct aspect when playing the MEncoded
> mpeg1. The problem is that the aspect isn't honored by at least three
> free software players: VLC, Xine and FFPlay (FFmpeg player). Could
> three different players be broken?
> 
> Unfortunately, I don't have a hardware VCD/DVD player to test if the
> problem is with MEncoder's VCD encoding or the decoding of the
> non-MPlayer software players.

Differences in aspect between MPlayer and other software players are
possible.

One reason is that mplayer rely on the option -monitoraspect in order
to get information about the aspect ratio of your display,
xine instead check the X server configuration. If the X server is misconfigured,
xine will show a wrong aspect ratio.
Check the option DisplaySize in the Section "Monitor" of your X Config file.
And verify in the X server log file that there is a message like 
DPI set to (X, Y)
where the difference between X and Y should be 0 or almost 0.

Giacomo