GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 582036
Aspect ratio, subtitle, etc. should be remembered
Last modified: 2018-05-24 10:33:53 UTC
When selecting an aspect ratio for a video, it should be remembered upon closing Totem and reopening it. Alternatively, a preference for desired aspect ratio for all videos (a la VLC) should be added. Other information: Physical screen dimensions rarely change, but video dimensions vary. Always having to select the right aspect ratio is annoying.
(In reply to comment #0) > When selecting an aspect ratio for a video, it should be remembered upon > closing Totem and reopening it. Alternatively, a preference for desired aspect > ratio for all videos (a la VLC) should be added. > > Other information: > Physical screen dimensions rarely change, but video dimensions vary. Always > having to select the right aspect ratio is annoying. Video dimensions vary, but most of them have aspect ratio information that means they should show up properly without you having to change the aspect ratio by hand. My thinking is that your X is lying about sizes, and gives Totem wrong dimensions information. What's the output of "xdpyinfo | grep dimensions" on your system?
Hi. The output is: dimensions: 1440x900 pixels (304x190 millimeters) A lot of videos I play in Totem appear as square, with black screen space on either side. In VLC there's an option in the preferences called "Source aspect ratio" (in the advanced Video prefs) that displays every video in the right aspect ratio no matter what the video's original dimensions are.
They probably appear as square because they lack aspect ratio information. Your screen's aspect ratio is 1.6, and the pixels are square. Do you actually have a 16:10 wide screen in your setup? So forcing the aspect ratio for all the sources is out of the question, but you should rather check your sources, and see why the aspect ratio information is either absent or wrong.
I forgot to add that if you're just missing a way to remove the black borders but the image appears with the correct aspect ratio, you should use the zoom functionality (see the view menu).
Yes, the default screen is set at the proper dimensions -- 16:10. I'm not sure what the issue is. I'm just used to having "16:10" set in VLC's source aspect ratio and having every video I play display properly (that is, with no black borders). I tried your suggestion of using zoom, but doing so to the point of fitting to my screen degrades video quality too much to be usable. I don't understand why automatically fitting a video to meet a set aspect ratio is out of the question, but then again I may not be fully aware of the concepts and processes here.
(In reply to comment #5) > Yes, the default screen is set at the proper dimensions -- 16:10. > > I'm not sure what the issue is. I'm just used to having "16:10" set in VLC's > source aspect ratio and having every video I play display properly (that is, > with no black borders). I'll reiterate. The screen aspect ratio being correct, this has everything to do with the files you're trying to play. What aspect ratio do those videos say they are, and what aspect ratio should they have? > I tried your suggestion of using zoom, but doing so to the point of fitting to > my screen degrades video quality too much to be usable. That would be a problem with the video card's driver. File a bug against your distribution's X.org driver about it (I have Intel cards, and the zoomed picture look good when using the OpenGL textured Xv port, which it does by default). > I don't understand why > automatically fitting a video to meet a set aspect ratio is out of the > question, but then again I may not be fully aware of the concepts and processes > here. Because it shouldn't be needed for the majority of (non-broken) files, and there's already a way to override the aspect ratio for those.
Don't mean to beat a dead horse, but I'm still not convinced this isn't a good feature to have. I have a lot of video files that I have either downloaded or ripped from DVDs myself and I'd say probably 75% of these don't display properly in Totem. So, it's clear to me that while videos are supposed to have aspect-ratio information encoded in them, many if not most do not. VLC solves this issue by allowing users to select their preferred aspect ratio, which it then forces every video played to conform to. This means that the user isn't constantly selecting the proper aspect ratio when opening videos. Surely this is not technically impossible, and it benefits the end-user by reducing needless clicks and stress, so why not consider the feature?
If they display with the correct aspect ratio in MPlayer or VLC automatically, then this is a bug in gstreamer. Could you please file bugs against gstreamer in this case? I filed some bugs myself for this some time ago and they were all fixed. Otherwise the files were just encoded/muxed incorrectly.
Add a grab-bag of other settings to remember for particular streams.
*** Bug 635857 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 629290 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
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