Prevent window from expanding beyond the screen borders

[Lozzy]

I don't know if this is a Windows only thing, perhaps someone who uses VLC on another platform can enlighten me.

One thing I often find quite troublesome about VLC is the way it behaves when the window resizes itself, particularly in the context of a large resolution video playing. Quite often I would find that the video window would expand itself just beyond the limits of my screen, making it tough to close the player or use the controls.

This proves to be quite annoying when it happens time and again, and after a while I went looking for the option to prevent that behavior. I did disable it, but the problem is still prevalent; if I toggle the Video - Always on top option, the window will be resized to fit the video, despite the fact that I have elected for that not to happen. That's much less of an issue though. I'm probably more bothered that this is the default behavior and could be annoying some others like me who don't necessarily know about the option.

I was wondering whether VLC could take a leaf out of WMP 12's book (yes, I know; blasphemy!). I noticed that it has some pretty nifty window size / positioning technique. I don't know exactly what the logic behind it is, but whenever I open a new video the window always seems to be right where I want it and the right size. I wonder whether this is something that could possibly be incorporated in future.

Thanks for reading!

Lozzy

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Yes, that would be cool, because so far it is a bit complex.

[vjott]

Yes, other and myself have begged for this feature repeatedly over the past two years. The Mac OS X version got it (I guess that most of the developers use Macs). PotPlayer, KMPlayer, Windows Media Player, ZoomPlayer, Mplayer WW, Media Player Classic -Home Cinema and many, many other players have had this feature for a very long time. If you aren't particularly picky and your needs are simple, you can use any of those. The best replacement for VLC Player is PotPlayer (it even has the chapter markings for MKV files) but you will need to mess around with codecs to get the best experience.

I have used (and will continue to use) VLC because as of version 2, it has everything I can possibly want: MKV linked files (ordered chapters) support, SSA/ASS subtitle support, chapter support and a very accurate seek bar with markings for the MKV chapters when you hover over it. Version 2.0 has been the best version of VLC that I've ever used. I've also been using the nightly builds for a couple months now in hope that they'd implemented this resize feature. One can continue to hope (or switch to a Mac ).

As I've been reminded before:The VLC developers are not at your service (they do not get your money) so if we've waited 2 years thus far, what's two more years (I'm just kidding of course, please don't have us wait 2 more years )

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

The easiest is to deactivate video auto-resize.

[Lozzy]

The easiest is to deactivate video auto-resize.

The setting isn't ideal for me; it regularly resets itself to the default value and even when I take the time to set it back it doesn't always work in the way I'd like. More to the point, having a the default behaviour be more user friendly would be better in my view. I think that's better for users who don't mess with their settings (I'm assuming that's the vast majority) and better for people who often reinstall things.

[vjott]

The easiest is to deactivate video auto-resize.

Deactivating video auto-resize is "a" solution but not "the" solution. I enable auto resize in the first place because I want to view my videos at their "optimum" size. By optimum, I mean that low resolution videos will be viewed at their ideal size without looking stretched and pixelated and high-resolution videos will be optimized to fit my screen whether that is my 15 inches laptop or 10 inches netbook. If I disable the feature then I would need to manually resize the player for every video I load.

If there is a way I can contribute to the project to see that this feature gets fixed, I'm more than willing (I have intermediate programming experience with object-oriented languages and scripting such as Javascript and PHP). If there are any tutorials you can direct me to, that I can peruse to bring myself up to speed with what I need to know it would be much appreciated.

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

Compiling VLC is hard, but you can do it by looking on our wiki.