The VideoLAN Forums

Friends, First thanks to everyone who has worked on VLC and also the experts who help on the forums.

I have a fair amount of SD video material, typically uncompressed main movies in .iso that are natively 16:9 or even 2.21:1 on my home server. While they play fine on my widescreen tvs, I also play them with VLC on a couple fo Home PCs, all of which at present have 4:3 monitors.

I would really like to be able to in as simple way zoom this material on VLC playback by about 1.5x, keeping the aspect ratio, with the sides cropped.

Is this impossible on VLC? I have tried all kinds of setting, with scale, aspect, crop and with those or with with default the "zoom" function literally does nothing on both my vista and windows 7 pc.

used scale ?

JB,
Yes as I mentioned I tried scale on the GUI. Scale will reduce the image but not increase its size. I have tried that on one windows 7 and one vista machine with multiple dvd files. scale alone does nothing but decrease the size.
I did look around before asking.T here seems to be nothing in the wiki documentation that addresses this, and a few times with the same question asked on the forums.

I am able get most of what I need through multiple steps, ie changing crop and then scale hotkes. But I am wondering if I can set this as a default to crop to 4:3 and scale up on the machines I have which have 4:3 monitors?

Alt+o should increase the size...

No. Alt-o it won't increase the size on any of my various windows machines beyond the width of the screen with vlc default settings.

Which is to say if I am playing a 16:9 or 2.35:1 dvd folder or iso on a with 4:3 displays with VLC, alt-o it wont increase the size to the point where I am say getting any cropping on the sides without first specifying a crop.

In my case I have a networked server with DVD compliant ISO's and in some cases these are going to 4:3 monitors and teaching my wife or kids one or two hot keys is one thing, but cropping each time is another.

As an example, in Media Player Classic, in Nero's player, and in the other three or four media players I have, a single hotkey will do this, only VLC won't. I love VLC, and the others won't play unmounted ISO, but alt o will in fact not increase to the point where any sides are being cropped.

If you could J-P, could you:
a) look at a 16:9 or 2.35:1 film on a 4:3 display with VLC and hit alt-o, It will not scale up to teh point where nay crop occurs.
b) Then open same file in Media Player classic and hit the "9" key a couple of times. You will see that in MPC it just zooms about 5% a step and is cropping the sides (aspect remains the same) while zooming. If you are on a 4:3 with widescreen content, you get a nice compromise between loosing 10 ot 20% of the non critical edges of the frame while getting a larger image.

What you want is available right out of the box with Alt-o ... on Linux ! I mean, alt-o keeps on enlarging the video beyond the screen size, while keeping the aspect ratio. (borders are cropped automatically). And you can enlarge it up to 10 times, with a 10% increment.

On Windows, there was a display issue (black screen), that was worked out the easy way by forcing zooming never to exceed the screen size.

Erwan10

Erwan:
Thank you. I thought I was crazy, JB is not just a Mod but an administrator and I was beginning to feel kind of funny about saying he was wrong. He is not wrong, we are just speaking a different language, he Linux, me Windows!

Obviously you know something about this. is this on a "to be fixed/implemented" schedule or is it pretty much "no time soon, if ever"?

Maybe they want to look at Media Center Classic for how it was done there?

I sure would hate to drop VLC, it is an outstanding software, and of course it would save me from having to convert (many, lol) hundreds of ISOs to video_ts or to mkv and use another displaying program, but I do have windows PCs with 4:3 that I don't intend to replace soon and I can't be the only one with some interest in the feature!.

Erwan:
Thank you. I thought I was crazy, JB is not just a Mod but an administrator and I was beginning to feel kind of funny about saying he was wrong. He is not wrong we are just speaking a different language, he Linux, me Windows! I thought it was a problem of me English, he French!

Obviously you know something about this. is this on a "to be fixed/implemented" schedule or is it pretty much "no time soon, if ever"?

Maybe they want to look at Media Center Classic for how it was done there?

I sure would hate to drop VLC, it is an outstanding software, and of course it would save me from having to convert (many, lol) hundreds of ISOs to video_ts or to mkv and use another displaying program, but I do have windows PCs with 4:3 that I don't intend to replace soon and I can't be the only one with some interest in the feature!.
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Update: I actually figured out what I need for practical purposes, with hotkey, the "c" key.

The crop from the drop down menu would crop reduce but then not allow me in increase size, the C key works differently -- it crops and increases size to take advantage of the screen.

So if a user has a 4:3 screen and very wide screen material that only uses 1/3 to 40% of the screen, the solution -- in widows -- is during playback in full screen to cycle the c key, this will crop and scale up! So for sample one can use the c key to bring 16:9or wider film to 16:10 or 5:3 and get a more satisfactory result on a 4:3 screen. why this works differently with hotkey and not dropdown is a mystery.