[MPlayer-users] please help test my mplayer widescreen converter wrapper script

[RC]

On Sat, 1 Jul 2006 14:31:07 -0500
"Daniel Manjarres" <danmanj2 at gmail.com> wrote:

> and weighs in at 509 lines. 

Apparently 50% of which are full lines of comments.  

> 1) it can crop WHITE letterbox bars. AND rainbow bars. AND statio ID
> logos. And popup titles (like in music videos).

I've never come across any of those, however, it sounds like what you
want could be easily accomplised with -vf dsize.  Tell it your screen
width, let it scale (in hardware) the heigh to match, and the horizonal
bars of a 4:3 letterboxed video will simply be off-screen.

> 2) it skips the begining of the file so it does not get confused by
> intro graphics or titles

That's quite easy to do with cropdetect.

> 3) it is aware of the screen aspect ratio, and optionally matches the
> crop to fit the screen

I'm not sure what you mean here.  If you have something wider than
your display, does it overcrop the width (which -panscan 1.0 would do),
or undercrop the height to match the display
(leaving black borders, which -vf dsize would do)?

> 6) It adds black (sometimes gray; mplayer bug) bars to the
> re-letterbox the active video area to fit the screen

Why not just let -fs do that part?  Also, -vf expand=aspect=$H/$W should
do the same thing.

It just seems like you could have done all this with a lot less work
(and a lot less time waiting before playback finally starts).

> The program is brittle. It depends on the console output of mplayer,
> which seems to change for no reason every few months. 

I think you'd save yourself a lot of trouble if you used -identify
instead of always trying to parse MPlayer's output for things like
aspect, width, height, etc...  Despite changes to mplayer, my cropdetect
script hasn't broken in the past couple years, since I've started using
it, nor does mplayer ever crash inside the script AFAICT.