www.lewiz.org

So I’ve been hacking the Freevo box again. My previous work with mplayer arguments is working beautifully—everything* shows up at the correct aspect ratio. I achieved this in a fairly dirty way, but so far I’ve found no better way of doing it.

For some reason the GeForce card in the Freevo box refuses to output at anything other than “standard” ratios: i.e. it outputs at 1024×768 instead of a more handy 16:9 ratio. To compensate for this I’ve configured Freevo to use 1024×576 (16:9), which works, in conjunction with the 16:9 zoom option on the TV. In order to get everything* else to display at the correct ratio I’ve had to force mplayer to not grow any larger than the same size (actually a little less in height for some odd reason). Some fancy use of the -geometry flag allows me to shift the image to the centre of the screen, where I then use some other options to force the correct (scaled) aspect ratio.

It’s fairly painful stuff, if you ask me.

This brings me on to ratios and standards in general. Why are they all so obscure? Why are the standards not designed in such a way that it is instantly straightforward to view the correctly scaled output, regardless of display size, stretch, etc. As for new modern widescreen TVs… just give over giving the user an option to change the aspect ratio. There should be a fixed default and that should be the “correct” aspect. I’m fed up of watching short fat people wander around my (James’) TV screen.

Anamorphic DVDs are something that is worthy of note. I was complaining about the fact that they need to be stretched horizontally in order to be displayed—it would surely make more sense for them to be packaged at the correct aspect instead. The reason they stretch them is to make use of the extra scanlines, which would otherwise be wasted as “black bars”. I complained to Vlad about this, but he suggested that it does make sense, thanks to the fact that cameras are not “widescreen”.

It turns out that Freevo doesn’t support proper DVD playback using MPlayer. Xine is the preferred choice, thanks to correct(ish) handling of DVD menus, chapters, subtitles, audio languages, etc. Much to my surprise there is no way to change (or even enable/disable) subtitles when using MPlayer. The last six hours or so have been spent fixing this. God knows how it took so long, but the Freevo code isn’t very well commented and I had a very hard time figuring out how things worked. I’ll spend a bit more time tidying my code up and enabling audio language and angle support before submitting a patch to the Freevo devs.

I’m sure happy that I can now enable subtitles on my foreign films :)

Tags: Computing

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 19th, 2006 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.