Created attachment 125611 [details] [review]
Patch to support 16:10 aspect ratio with GStreamer backend

Adds 16:10 to the list of custom aspect ratios. Works as expected with GStreamer backend, not tested with xine backend.

That definitely won't work on xine, as xine only supports the five ratios we had previously. I'd suggest the way to do it is to modify bvw so that a list of supported aspect ratios can be returned by the backend, and then use that to build the menu, but that's getting quite complex.

16:10 is the ratio of your screen, not the movie you're trying to play. The menu item forces the aspect ratio of the movie to be the one selected, it has nothing to do with your screen.

Find me a movie with a 16:10 aspect ratio in the wild, and we can think about adding this menu item. If you have display problems, with the aspect ratio being wrong, check your X logs, the size of the monitor is probably badly detected.

I just checked with gnome-display-properties, my screen is being detected correctly and indeed has a 16:10 aspect ratio. I'd like to force a 16:9 movie to be displayed as 16:10, since I really don't need letterboxes on a 12" screen.

As Ubuntu brainstorm confirms (http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/11696/) there is a significant user demand for this feature.

Now as far as I understand, since the default aspect ratio is Auto, setting a custom aspect ratio is only necessary when wanting to coerce a movie to a different ratio (to avoid letterboxing I guess) so I don't see why 16:10 or even user defined aspect ratios shouldn't be supported.

That's not how it works. If you want to avoid letterboxing, using the zoom feature (available in the xine-lib version in 2.24, and both GStreamer and xine-lib in 2.25). Changing the aspect ratio to 16:10 if you have a 16:9 movie will just make people fatter on the screen.

Closing as WONTFIX as per comment #5.