Perform image rescaling in the player, rather than in hardware?

[Katie Boundary]

Every media player I've seen suffers the same two issues related to rescaling:

1) The user has no control over the rescaling method used (linear, Hermite, Mitchell-Netravali, Catrom, Lanczos etc.)

2) If the player is being run in a virtual machine, or if graphics drivers are not installed, the player falls back to nearest-neighbor resizing

This indicates to me that the rescaling is being done by the graphics card. Why not allow the player to perform the rescaling? This would allow both of the above problems to be solved.

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

You can force software scaling by selecting a video output module that can't do scaling such as plain X11 or GDI. Then you can choose the scaling algorithm from the swscale module preferences.

Obviously, performance will degrade badly, and that's why nobody does this except when transcoding.

[Katie Boundary]

Okay... how do I do any of that?