[mythtv] Ticket #4872: Detect if video is letterboxed and switch to corect fill mode

[Willy Boyd]

On Sun, Mar 30, 2008 at 3:07 AM, Petr Stehlik <pstehlik at sophics.cz> wrote:
> Mårten Bohlin píše v St 26. 03. 2008 v 10:21 +0100:
>
> > Since this patch seems to work very well. So I have uploaded a "final"
>  > version to the ticket now. This version is the same as version 6 but
>  > all debug code has been removed.
>  >
>  > Does anybody has any suggestion of any other issue that I could have a
>  > look at now?
>
>  For me, the "default zoom: half" does not work as expected because it is
>  zooming even contents that would fit perfectly on screen without any
>  black bars - i.e. 16:9 movie on 16:9 screen is zoomed as well. The
>  default zoom should IMHO zoom to half (if enabled) only if the movie is
>  4:3 and screen is 16:9 (not sure about 16:9 movie on 4:3 screen).
>
>  Petr
>

I thought that "half" only specified how much to zoom?  Even if the
video is 4:3, it may be displaying a 16:9 movie or show with the black
bars encoded into the stream.  Zooming in on this is what this feature
enables.

I've been running this since last week and it seems to be pretty
solid.  The only remaining issue I might have is that it would be nice
to be able to disable it for DVDs.  We were watching a movie this
weekend, Dan in Real Life I believe, and I think it was a anamorphic
2.35:1 ratio video.  In other words it was widescreen, but still with
a small bit of black bar at the top and bottom of the screen.  This
triggered the auto-fill to kick in.  Easy enough to change with the
OSD menu, so it's only a minor annoyance.  I'm picky about movies and
almost always want those in the original aspect with no "overscan".
In fact this might be what the poster above was talking about so I'm
sorry if I didn't get that :)