Hi all! As there was a short thread lately on freevo possibly being used on a 16:9 screen I will give you a personal experience report here. Getting freevo running on fbdev with a 16:9 resolution is more work than you think and I suggest that we tell users more about it as displays with 16:9 ratio seem to get rather popular especially with cheaper LCDs. Read on if you are interested.
I started with 1.5.0, but quickly moved to 1.5.1 as it fixed some issues elsewhere unrelated to skin stuff and now I use 1.5.2 from the day it came out (actually that visually fixed at least an annoying crash on ssr screensaver for me). Congratulations to the freevo developers. I have a plasma with a resolution of 848x480 which is not much but sufficient and it has rougly a ratio of 16:9. Be warned that there are plasma displays out there where the physical ratio is 16:9, but the resolution ratio isn't (e.g. some plasma displays use a resolution of 1024x1024 on a physical 16:9 screen!). In order to support them freevo definitely needs to support setting the ratio separately. But this shouldn't be the point here. On the PC side I have a G400 which is well supported by almost all applications and drivers (freevo, mplayer, fbdev, cvidix). Unfortunately, the G400 only supports screen widths that are multiples of 16. 848 isn't, so I rounded it up to 856 which worked for me. I played around a little while with fbset to get the right settings for 856x480 with exactly (!) 60Hz, but at the end I had them. The plasma natively showed the picture of the G400 without any black borders and zooming. Surprisingly, putting the specification into /etc/fb.modes wasn't sufficient as freevo was still set to 800x600, but patching freevo to 848x480 also didn't change anything. Everthing I tried I always ended up with a wired 960x720 mode (I actually do not remember it exactly, but I checked it using fbset while freevo was running and it was around that resolution). The problem lies in the SDL!!! When used on framebuffer devices it uses an internal reference table of modes, which are only 4:3 and 960x720 was in it. I patched the binary of libSDL by changing the 960x720 line to 848x480 in a hex editor (compiling it from scratch with all the debian dependences took too long and was even a bigger mess) and voila now freevo comes up with 16:9. However, the default skin looked a little stretched. So, I simply copied the basic.fxd and edited it (actually I rewrote it from scratch) to adapt it to 848x480. I can upload that one to the skin repository if someone wants to. It should be farely easy to adapt it to other 16:9 resolutions. The biggest differences in that skin are the tv guide and the audio player stuff. I had to redesign them completely to get everything on the screen. The skin also offers different background colorings (same picture but hue changed) and I change them randomly. However, even with changes to the skin you are only half through. I have a finetuned local_conf.py which might give others hints on how to modify mplayer's commandline to get everything in the right place. If someone is also interested in this stuff I can also sent it to this list. Cheers, Stephan Kanthak ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Sybase ASE Linux Express Edition - download now for FREE LinuxWorld Reader's Choice Award Winner for best database on Linux. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=5588&alloc_id=12065&op=click _______________________________________________ Freevo-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-devel
