VLC really needs custom Pan-scan!

[Juggalo]

Most displays have an aspect ratio of 4:3 or 16:10. When watching a movie with an aspect ratio of 2.35, it will only take about 50% of the vertical space.

In most other players you can zoom in a little bit (a custom amount), partially trimming off some content at the left and right side, so that a larger area of your screen is used. Here's what I mean:



Ideally you'd be able to manually slide the pan scan from 0% (top, default) to 100% (bottom).

Note that this is NOT changing the aspect ratio, which is shown on the right: you don't want to stretch the movie out of proportions (circles should be circles, not eggs).

[mike18xx]

I like this, and would suggest that it also enable vertical scaling as well, in order to permit better screen utilization when viewing 4x3 video on 16x9 monitors.

[Juggalo]

I like this, and would suggest that it also enable vertical scaling as well, in order to permit better screen utilization when viewing 4x3 video on 16x9 monitors.

Yep indeed, my example was horizontal but it's all the same actually: no pan scan (the default) should be a 'best fit' of the whole movie in the screen/window, leaving black borders if aspect ratio of movie and screen/window are different. 100% pan scan should be fully covering the screen/window (zoomed in whatever direction necessary). Manually sliding from 0 to 100 to easily get a nice trade-off between missing content at the edges versus unused screen space.

[mike18xx]

Also, there should be a means to permit the viewer to choose what part of the image will be onscreen. IOW, it won't just center-zoom.

For instance, in the 4x3 inside 16x9 example, I would obviously prefer to cut off actors' waists rather than their heads.

[DGMurdockIII]

this might be usfull in doing this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_%26_scan

http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?tit ... ration_API

http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?tit ... celeration

http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?tit ... mpensation