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AC3 passthru and 16:9 support

Posted: Sun Aug 08, 2004 9:08 am
by nobspangle
I'm quite pleased to see that the sound is output from the optical connector, but it is just an spdif mirror of what is coming out of the analogue connectors. Could do with adding AC3 passthru and later DTS.

16:9 support is slightly more important, for me it kind of makes this media player useless since it can't output 16:9 videos to a 16:9 TV without having squashed fat faces and black bars at the top and the bottom of the screen.

Posted: Sun Aug 08, 2004 12:17 pm
by sord_fish
also if there could be an option to control the audio output to all speakers that would be a nice feature as well.

Posted: Sun Aug 08, 2004 2:44 pm
by ShALLaX
The Xbox has no mixer, so i dont know if thats possible... 16:9... ill have to look in to, to be honest i didnt know if that was even possible. If you want to paste me a modeline, so much the better!

Posted: Sun Aug 08, 2004 10:32 pm
by nobspangle
I'm not sure a modline will fix it, trouble is mythtv is assuming that the screen is 4:3 so if I play a 16:9 movie it presents it in a letterbox. The media player needs to know the aspect ratio of the screen. I might check with the mythtv developer to see if he has any sugestions. You can't have a catch all situation, every film is different. DVD's are anamorphic so they need to be treated differently. What media player is mythtv using? There maybe something that can be tweaked there.

Has anybody tried the media centre on a 720p HDTV? What kind of results do you get there when playing back 1.85:1 DVDs and 16:9 DivX/XviD (640x352 etc)

Posted: Sun Aug 08, 2004 11:31 pm
by ShALLaX
Thinking about it.. the issue could be the kernel driver itself... since its only programmed to do specific resolutions. Currently, mce is using mplayer.. but im planning on switching to Xine for dvd playback.

Posted: Mon Aug 09, 2004 7:23 am
by nobspangle
there is an option for mplayer

Code: Select all

-monitoraspect 16:9
I'll check it out when I get back from work, there is also one to pass ac3 to your spdif output

Code: Select all

-ac -hwac3

Posted: Mon Aug 09, 2004 4:08 pm
by ShALLaX
Youll need to edit /media/.mythtv/mplayerlaunch to add those...

Posted: Sat Aug 14, 2004 8:54 am
by nobspangle
OK finally got round to testing this. The 16:9 setting is great (most of the time) the ac3 setting doesn't work, it just breaks the sound output.

The reason why I say most of the time for the 16:9 setting is that it's fine if you are watching a widescreen movie, but if you want to watch something that has a 4:3 aspect you get black bars down the sides of the screen, which (whilst being geometrically correct) isn't really what you want. I don't really know how you get round this, 4:3 video should fill the screen, anything 16:9 or wider should play at the correct aspect ratio.

Posted: Sat Aug 14, 2004 5:52 pm
by lotw
nobspangle wrote:OK finally got round to testing this. The 16:9 setting is great (most of the time) the ac3 setting doesn't work, it just breaks the sound output.

The reason why I say most of the time for the 16:9 setting is that it's fine if you are watching a widescreen movie, but if you want to watch something that has a 4:3 aspect you get black bars down the sides of the screen, which (whilst being geometrically correct) isn't really what you want. I don't really know how you get round this, 4:3 video should fill the screen, anything 16:9 or wider should play at the correct aspect ratio.
Actually I would rather have the black bars on the side for 4:3 then stretching. Correct aspect ratio is more important.

Posted: Sat Aug 14, 2004 6:32 pm
by ShALLaX
Next version will use Xine.. so maybe that will be different.

Posted: Sun Aug 15, 2004 11:21 am
by nobspangle
lotw wrote:Actually I would rather have the black bars on the side for 4:3 then stretching. Correct aspect ratio is more important.
My TV does a sort of zoom and stretch mode with a 4:3 image so the distortion is hardly noticeable, you loose a bit of picture top and bottom, but I would rather that than waste screen real estate.

Posted: Sun Aug 15, 2004 6:01 pm
by ShALLaX
The moral to this story is, always buy the cheapest 14" TV you can find ;)