[MPlayer-users] Widescreen Question (To scale or not scale)

[Pepe]

El Viernes, 19 de Enero de 2007 13:46, Jorge Fábregas escribió:
> On Sunday 07 January 2007 2:08 pm, Andrew Savchenko wrote:
> > Do NOT upscale unelss you want to waste bits on your hdd. Just set
> > proper aspect ratio when encoding. (Note: this is metioned in the
> > docs (encoding-guide) as often as possible).
>
> I'm back at this thread as these days I was encoding from anamorphic
> widescreen (PAL) sources.  Just like mentioned here and other places, I
> kept the original frame size (4:3) when encoding and set the aspect ratio
> accordingly so that at playback time it will show in correct aspect ratio
> (16:9).   However, when I play those videos in Windows (windows media
> player & DivX player) ...these players won't detect the specified aspect
> ratio...they just won't give a damn. You need to specify manually the AR...
>
> In mplayer my videos play fine, as it detects the AR flag.  The problem is
> that I'm encoding video for friends that use Windows (who are not that
> computer literate, and for sure won't know how to change aspect ratio..).
>
> My point is..It's a shame these players in Windows, which are very popular
> in that platform, won't detect the specified aspect ratio. I guess I should
> write them :)
>
> Meanwhile, I'll just scale my footage to 16:9 AR with these anamorphic
> widescreen sources wasting a couple of bits :(

There's another problem. The standalone dvd players with support for divx, I 
think most of them don't read the aspect ratio flag. So if you want to see 
those videos comfortably in your TV screen the videos should be scaled. 

I realized that (right now) anamorphic avi's are only worthy if you're going 
to watch them in your computer and using mplayer.

Another option is to encode the videos to mpeg-2.

-- 
Pepe