I demand that Ian Bates may or may not have written...
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.
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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.
Freeview STBs will use 4:3 or letterboxing, either 14:9 or 16:9, as indicated by the AFD setting embedded in the MPEG stream. xine-lib has no support for this wrt picture shape, though it does report its presence and value; there's a patch which improves this. I've observed problems with it, though, when the setting is changed.
http://xine-lib.alioth.debian.org/patches-1.1/AFD_support.patch
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