[MPlayer-users] Monitor Aspect Ratio

[D Richard Felker III]

On Mon, Oct 20, 2003 at 03:40:05PM +1000, Adam Nielsen wrote:
> [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
> > > at a resolution of 920x512, which, if calculated automatically would yeild
> > > an  aspect ratio of 1.79:1 (or 16.17:9, a little more than widescreen)
> > > instead of  the correct ratio of 4:3.
> 
> > You misunderstand. monitor_aspect is the aspect ratio of the monitor
> > in physical dimensions, not pixels. So as long as your monitor is
> > physically 4:3, it doesn't matter what video mode you have it in --
> > MPlayer will scale the video appropriately to preserve aspect.
> > monitor_aspect is only needed if you have a strange monitor.
> 
> That was my point - you've been arguing that autodetecting the monitor's 
> aspect ratio would give wrong results sometimes, and that was a case where 
> autodetection would give you the wrong results - it *should* be 4:3 (like 
> mplayer defaults to now) but if you tried to autodetect it you'd erroneously 
> get close to 16:9 instead because of the strange resolution.  Hence your 
> argument to default -monitoraspect to 4:3, which will provide correct results 
> in cases like this.

No, autodetect is not based on pixels. If there were an autodetect, it
would be based on querying the horizontal and vertical DPI values from
the X server, but since these are rounded to integers, they'll rarely
be correct.

Rich