VLC: Show "original size" video in fullscreen mode, instead of streching to fill vertical hieght

[E-waste]

VLC allows showing a video in its original soze, or doubling the size.  For 480p content, this works on a monitor resolution height of 960 or more.  But it seems to only allow this setting in windowed mode.  Also, minimal imterface still shows window borders and other distractions.

 

I want "full screen" to work as a blanking mechanism to just show the video in the output setting of original or double, and hide everything else.  I must be missing something.  For those of you wondering why someone wouldn't want full height video, is that some resolutions don't evenly match others.

 

480 video in full-frame 4:3 is (you already know).  so on a 1080p monitor, a full screem 480p video is not properly represented, pixel for pixel.  Somewhere along the line, the image is being stretched or manipulated.  I have tried for a couple minutes to zoom in extensively, and look for any abnormalties in 480p stretched to 1080p height, and I couldn't find any noticable distortions.  I thought I would, but I'll keep testing.  I have a feeling this is more important than we can visually perceive with our eyes.  Just because we are completely unaware of the very un-noticable distortions, does not mean we should blatantly ignore them.

 

The very same goes for watching low resolution 480p shows, or movies, at full height 1080p on streaming services.  Unless they are cropping pixel at the top and bottom, then all viewers are subject to pixel interpolation--in fact I'm not sure that would fix interpolation eithwr.  480 is just not a multiple of 1080 so the only way to do it right is to have letterbox borders--just having the option would be enough.

 

  It may seem picky, but I think this is an issue that deserves so much more awareness.  We all spend hundreds or a couple hubdred on high-quality TVs, only for the content on them to be distorted by the video streaming platform.  No network will ever give a care about something they, nor you nor I can actually perceive, so it won't change, but I think we should still be aware and understand this issue.

[Needfuldoer]

 

Un-tick "Always Fit Window" from the Video menu and the video will play at native resolution in full-screen.

 

 

31 minutes ago, Timpster said:

No network will ever give a care about something they, nor you nor I can actually perceive, so it won't change, but I think we should still be aware and understand this issue.

Believe me, your average viewer doesn't care in the least about non-integer scaling. 

 

If a network ran SD content letterboxed and pilalrboxed in the middle of a field, they'd get viewer complaints out the wazoo because "the picture is small". It will also show "corruption" at the top of the picture (line 21 captioning data in the vertical blanking interval.)

 

Standard def video was designed for overscan, so even on a tube TV you don't see the "entire' picture.

 

Never mind the poor souls watching that postage-stamped video, postage-stamped again because they have an SD cable box hooked up to an HDTV. (Or the ones who stretch non-anamorphic content to 16:9 so "the picture fills up the whole screen".)

 

Many cable providers distribute all their HD content at 720p anyway, to save bandwidth. You should see the moving oil paintings that come out of an ATSC transmitter cramming two HD channels and four SD subchannels over 6 mhz of spectrum.

[Avocado Diaboli]

Some monitors and TVs allow for integer scaling, if you really, truly must have the correct upscaling. Or you can try your luck with purpose built upscalers. But honestly, as you put it, it's not discernable to anybody, so you'd have to give people and especially those making the devices and software a really good reason why we should care in the first place.

 

As for VLC, you can disable "Always Fit Window" in the video settings menu and it'll be rendered at the original resolution in full screen mode. There you can then set it to your desired integer multiplied scale.

 

[OhioYJ]

6 hours ago, Needfuldoer said:

If a network ran SD content letterboxed and pilalrboxed in the middle of a field, they'd get viewer complaints out the wazoo because "the picture is small". 

Actually I'm aggravated by the all the networks and streaming providers that feels the need to try and crop classic movies and TV shows into wide screen format. There is nothing wrong with pilalrbox on content that was filmed that way.  So I'm on the opposite side of that argument. 

[E-waste]

If anyone would like to do a test in VLC video "zoom" setting, I'm finding it blurs the original video, or in my test, picture.

 

I'm on a significantly older version, in the 2x range, but I'd be willing to bet my arms and legs that it's still an issue in the latest version, without updating my current copy.

 

I created a 640x480 grid, screen captured in a fullscreen gimp window.  I then exported this to .png, as it's known to be created for use in charts and line art.

 

Edit:  The uploaded image at 2.35MB is horribly blurry when I view it in firefox.  To create it:

 

1. open gimp and select 640 by 480 as the canvas size.

 

2. On the blank background right click for menu > view > show grid.

 

3.Then configure grid.

 

4. I'm using "crosshair" at 8.0 pixel intervals, which ideally should display straight crosslines but at my smaller 480 size I guess it's a bit rounded in all corners for some reason.

 

5. Because this is a "view" feature and not actually added into the final imagw, you'll have to perform a print screen of the display, and then crop the image. 

Actually, you don't need to crop the image, VLC will still double the picture!

 

In vlc, in original, I can use windows magnifier, all the way up to it's maximum, of 1,600% (yes 16x), and the lines are as dark as the background.

 

But, if I zoom to "2:1" in the vlc video options, it's blurry.  No wonder DVD's played from a disc have looked so blurry.  If anyone would like to load my grid image, and see what it's output at 2:1 in vlc is, download the attached file.

 

Alternatively, go put in a dvd (for those who still have disc players) and use windows magnifier to compare original video zoom to both 2:1 and fullscreen (full height pillarbox) video output.

 

I'm surprised this isn't mentioned on the VLC (videolan dot org) forums, I guess not a soul is aware of this but me so far.

[Avocado Diaboli]

5 hours ago, Timpster said:

If anyone would like to do a test in VLC video "zoom" setting, I'm finding it blurs the original video, or in my test, picture.

 

I'm on a significantly older version, in the 2x range, but I'd be willing to bet my arms and legs that it's still an issue in the latest version, without updating my current copy.

I downloaded your test pattern and with the default filter, it looks blurry. You can remedy that by going into the preferences, switching the view over to "Show Settings -> All" in the bottom left corner, assuming your old version has the same layout. That gives you the ability to search for all the settings with a text box. Search for "Swscale". This allows you to set the scaling mode. 

 

 

I didn't extensively test it, but setting it to SincR gave me this result, with the default Bicubic on the left, screenshotted, imported into Photoshop and zoomed in the viewport.

 

[E-waste]

Restarting the program and using different swscale settings doesn't seem to be applying changes. I reset all settings, set sineR, no changes.  Also I believe NN is actually the proper setting.  So, how do I force this software scaling?  I'd also like to see an example of NN on your setup.

[E-waste]

.

[E-waste]

11 hours ago, Avocado Diaboli said:

I didn't extensively test it, but setting it to SincR gave me this result, with the default Bicubic on the left, screenshotted, imported into Photoshop and zoomed in the viewport.

O.K. re-edit.  I have tried with the new version.  Here's where I'm not getting any further:

 

I can set the video filter checkbox on sepia, and it works.  I get a yellow image on the picture.

 

Original size is clear, but 2:1 is still blurry.  I don't understand what is required to be checked in the filters, or elsewhere, to enable the different swscale settings like SincR and Nearest pixel.

 

So, how can we compare settings, because I can't consistently test the different scaling options.  Once I have that, I'll test all of them, and if none of them appear to be integer scaling, I'll post a feature request on the vlc forums.

 

In version 2.6x it has a filter checkbox for swscale, that checkbox has been remove, or placed in some other setting with a different name, adding to the complexity needlessly.  How you got this to work, seemingly without any issue at all, is beyond my understanding.

 

Addition: even adding

 

swscale

 

into that text box in the filter screen with all the checkboxes (none of which say anything about scaling) doesn't seem to have an effect.  I just need your exact settings.  I looked in the program files folder, and I didn't see any text files like .ini that I could use to compare settings.

 

So:

 

• What filters are enable
• What text is listed in the text field under the check boxes
• What video output mode do you have selected (OpenGL, OpenGL for Windows, DirectX 9, DirectX 11 etc)
• Hopefully that's all I need to know to make this work, but it sure doesn't seem that way.

Edited January 2, 2023 by Timpster

[Avocado Diaboli]

1 hour ago, Timpster said:

So:

 

• What filters are enable
• What text is listed in the text field under the check boxes
• What video output mode do you have selected (OpenGL, OpenGL for Windows, DirectX 9, DirectX 11 etc)
• Hopefully that's all I need to know to make this work, but it sure doesn't seem that way.

I'll have to correct myself, I probably changed something else between testing and drew the wrong conclusion. So to get to the bottom of it, I reset VLC to default stock settings. I'm using the most current version, 3.0.18. After I had the stock settings back and used the Swscale menu, it didn't work. But I think I've found something that could help you. In the preferences, under Video in the Display section, I switched the Output from "Automatic" to "Windows GDI video output". That worked on your test pattern when set to a 2:1 zoom.

 

[E-waste]

That did it.  I had only tried OpenGL dx 11 and the other dx.

 

I saw the option but hadn't tested it.

 

I wonder now how this will work on Linux, testing soon.

Thanks for your time and I hope you enjoy double scaled integer-scaling on DVD size content as much as I will.

 

Now I can finally buy all the dvd sets of old tv series and watch them in orginal, almost full screen quality without a MASSIVE loss in both contrast and clarity.  Really, really appreciated.

 

This "bug" has probably been the default since VLC's first release all these years later, I can't beleive it took me to point this out.  Hopefully I can encourage the devs to change it to this, also Nearest pixel ot NN also looks excellent and I'd guess less cpu usage but that doesn't matter these days.

 

I've been waiting on an email to activate my account for two days now, if anyone can get the email faster than I can and make this a feature request I would appreciate that as well.

 

My grid looks awesome and dark lines with a light yellow shade.

 

Here's to local media storage!