Hi there,
let me start with the background of this, in the last few weeks, a very promising new true color skin raised some attention on the german speaking VDR-Portal, namely "nOpacity" ([1] and [2]). The layout of some of the screens quickly brought up the idea that it would be nice to have the video properly scaled to the available size (smaller than the actual screen), which I tried to already patch with some (but only some) success ([3]). The patch is based on an old hack, called "YaEPG patch", which introduces a member of type tArea in cOsd, which then can be filled with geometry information, whose "bpp" member is abused as a hint weather or not to scale by some skin or plugin which wants to scale down the video material, and you got it, it's as ugly as can be. The problems which we encountered where that the output plugin (in this case softhddevice) knows much more about the video material (like if it is for example 4:3 letterboxed, if the user selected some zooming, some cropping, and so on) than a skin or any other plugin can cope with, in order to get the video scaled right, and there are cases where the scaling is simply wrong. It is and should remain the job of the output plugin to do this right with all the information it has access to, other plugins should only have to ask them to "properly" scale inside an available rectangle, possibly with the hint to just scale (back) full-size of the output device (which could also be an X window). Now, my question, is this issue worth an API extension in cDevice, for example something like
bool ScaleVideo(tArea availableRectangle); bool ScaleVideoFullScreen();
which could return true only if the output plugin is capable of doing this, or should plugin developers rather agree upon a custom service which output plugins may provide and skins or other plugins may ask for?
Regards, Lucian
[1]: http://www.vdr-portal.de/board1-news/board2-vdr-news/115810-announce-skin-no...
[2]: http://www.vdr-portal.de/board16-video-disk-recorder/board55-vdr-plugins/115...
[3]: http://www.vdr-portal.de/board1-news/board2-vdr-news/p1106087-announce-skin-...