[MPlayer-users] AutoDetect aspect ratio

[Reimar Döffinger]

On 25.11.2014, at 20:10, David Thatcher <dthatcher7 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Greetings,
> 
> I created an Xubuntu image that launches MPlayer to play a video on
> startup. I went to deploy it and the screen resolution was 4:3, so the wide
> aspect video displayed with black bars at the top and bottom. I was able to
> solve this by setting -aspect 4:3 in the mplayer options. The question is,
> I am going to be deploying to a variety of different screens and I want
> MPlayer to force whatever aspect ratio is represented by whatever screen
> resolution is currently set. If I leave -aspect 4:3 on a wide screen, I get
> black bars on the side. I am very much trying to avoid editing the launch
> script on each machine.
> Or... given that what I am going after is for MPlayer to run the video in
> such a way as to not leave the black bars regardless of screen resolution,
> is there a better command line option to use?

This sounds like it will look rather horrible...
But if you really want to do this, the easier option is to just override the monitor aspect (I think the option is called -monitor-aspect) to match the video one.
Worst case specify both.
In addition e.g. -vo gl has an option to just disable aspect scaling as an alternative.