Dear all,
I have lurked a while on this list but until now have not had reason to post.
I am unable to configure xineliboutput to my liking. I don't imagine I am the only one with this issue, but I have not been able to find a solution, either by trial and error or by googling. I would appreciate to hear how other people configure their vdr boxes.
My output device is a 4:3 analog TV. Watching a 4:3 stream is fine in the sense that the full real estate of the TV is used. Watching a 16:9 stream results in (depending on various settings I have tried) either the stream 'compressed' vertically to maintain the 16:9 ratio (with black bars top and bottom), or a vertically 'stretched' image that loses the 16:9 ratio but fills the entire TV screen.
What I would like is to maintain the stream 16:9 ratio but by by cropping the left and right sections of the stream that fall 'outside' the TV, so the full real estate of the TV is used, at the expense of losing some stream information.
I have played with various xineliboutput settings, all through the OSD plugin setup menu. My current settings are roughly:
LOCAL FRONTEND: Using Xv and set to fullscreen and stretched-to-window video. Aspect ratio set to 4:3 (although Pan&Scan and CenterCutOut looked promising but don't do what I thought they might).
VIDEO: aspect ratio set to automatic. Anything else seems to force the aspect ratio to that value. Software scaling does not seem to be the route to follow either. Autocrop 4:3 letterbox to 16:9 is disabled, but also looked promising, but I could not obtain the bahaviour I desire.
So (finally) a direct question: how do people with 4:3 output devices and vdr with xineliboutput configure their boxes?
Some brief details of my system:
I am using vdr 1.6.0, a recent-ish (last few days) xineliboutput CVS version running under X (i.e. vdr-sxfe) on a NVIDIA 6150 device with the binary NVIDIA module (TV-out at 720x576) watching DVB-S streams (thanks to a NOVA-S-Plus and a HVR4000 with multiproto, for what that is worth), all connected to a 4:3 aspect ratio TV.
I thought this would be a quick question but I have managed to write an epic! Sorry about that.
Best wishes,
Ian.