The VideoLAN Forums

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

Has this feature been added yet? I needed to use Media Player Classic recently to make a 2:35 film look reasonable on my monitor. Keeping the aspect correct but just doing an intelligent zoom is a very needed feature.

Cropping (hotkey C) and Aspect ratio (hotkey A) should help you. However it should be improved to feel the real freedom like in MPC player using Numpad keys (+Ctrl if necessary). GOM Player just use it the same way.
Recently I have suggested some solution for VLC to change Aspect Ratio by changing width of video on the fly in Video Effects control panel (Video effects control panel: +PADDING +Custom AR). So far no response.

Cropping (hotkey C) and Aspect ratio (hotkey A) should help you. However it should be improved to feel the real freedom like in MPC player using Numpad keys (+Ctrl if necessary).

mederi,
Just so we're on the same page, I don't want the aspect changed, doing that squishes or stretches the image. I want the ability to intelligently crop, just like MPC does. True, pressing A and setting to 4:3, then pressing C a few times does fill my monitor, but it is slightly distorted. The correct way, like MPC does it, is to remove content from the left and right and then enlarge the center.

pcunite, if predefined cropping ratios (hotkey C) do not meet your needs then you can use cropping tool (Crop tab on the picture behind the link in my previous post) to easily cut off right and left side of picture. Its like pan scan, isn't it? If default aspec ratio is all right then do not change it so proportions stay as should be, but sometimes it is also necessary to change them. By the way changing aspect ratio of cropped video does not work in VLC 1.1.x
Anyway I have meant all basic adjustments to picture. I think that cropping, padding and aspec ratio in video effects control panel (window) in VLC could completely cover it. User friendly, on the fly (like cropping tool), fully custom way and a bit different way than in MPC But I also suggest to define some Numpad hotkeys for these operations: crop up-down-left-right, pad u-d-l-r, ar l-r(~width +/-). Padding should not be necessary, but that is the way VLC works - if you need to get subtitles usually under the picture, you need to add some pad to the bottom of the picture first.
Thanks