I was tinkering with my MPlayer configuration for LIRC tonight to figure out a small OSD annoyance, when I found this interesting thing that I always thought would be nice. The slave mode has an option to switch the aspect ratio during playback.
The reason this is nice is for those who are using mplayer to watch a fullscreen format (4/3) show on a widescreen TV, and they aren’t already stretching it to 16/9. Basically, it stretches stuff if you want it to. Personally, I like watching stuff in the original format it was filmed in, but sometimes I want to expand it to fit the whole screen too. This let’s me do that.
Here’s the relative config for my lircrc file:
begin
prog = mplayer
button = some_button_you_mapped
config = switch_ratio 1.77778
config = switch_ratio 1.33
end
So, what that does is switches stuff from fullscreen to wide, and back again by pressing it again. Pretty spiffy.
I also uploaded my mplayer lircrc file. It’s nothing glamorous, but might give someone some ideas.