When you put the playback into full screen mode, it doesn't louse up the aspect ratio. (That's a configurable parameter; it can be made to do so, but I'm not sure why anyone would want to.)

On this machine, it means I'm playing back normal DVDs onto a 1920*1200 display, of which it's using 1600*1200. There's a bar that appears on the bottom of the screen when you move the mouse that has all the player controls on it, and a few seconds after you stop doing things it vanishes again.

So that means it's a 2.5:1 linear stretch going from a nominal 640*480 to 1600*1200, or 6.25 times the pixels. Some frame grabs below the fold. 

Here's a raw frame grab from the fifth episode of Shingu:

The aspect ratio is wrong because it's 720*480, 3:2, instead of 4:3.

If you take the small display window and resize it to full screen, this is what you get:

Which is about what you'd expect, isn't it? (UPDATE: Actually, not quite. What we're seeing there is one field, not one frame, so the jaggies are even worse.)

What's amazing to me is that if you start playing it, what you get looks like this:

And that is damned good. No sign of big pixels or stairstepping at all. And the CPU load is really low; you can barely see anything going on with the task manager. I have hardware graphical acceleration enabled (the default) and apparently this is all being done there.

In fact, the full size looks so good that it's more comfortable to watch it at that size than smaller. On this display, a 640*480 window is about 4 inches diagonal.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Computers at 10:57 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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