On Sonntag 19 August 2007, Michael Beal wrote: > Then the ratio calculations are faulty and need to be addressed.
Michael, maybe it's just me, but I read a lot of unproductive criticism in
your postings. As long as you suspect others to "poo-poo out" ideas "without
really understanding" and "ignoring the reality", I wonder how many people
are motivated to take their time and answer your postings at all, given that
a lot of ignorance from your side shines through, too.
> Images which, by pixel dimensions, are square get stretched out of
> shape. According to what's being said, the skinning engine should
> display images at their designed/intended size with _zero_ distortion
> because everything is being adjusted based on screen aspect.
There's no RYM ("read your mind") mode in the skinning engine. However, as
you seem to have realized, the skinning engine *does* scale based on the
ratio between the configured screen geometry and the skin size. This is
intended and does work for sizes larger than 800x600 (which a lot of people -
e.g. me - do use).
> I think everyone is caught up in the "programming intent" behind the
> skins and ignoring the reality of it all. The intent is for everything
> to self-adapt, with the engine placing things where they should go.
> The reality is this doesn't happen at screen resolutions over the
> default 800x600. If I have my freevo.conf geometry at 800x600, choose
> a skin built for 800x600 and do "freevo -fs" from the command line, I
> get icons and images that are stretched. This is to be expected,
> correct?
AFAICS, yes (for your setup). The stretching probably happens in the X server
or monitor - e.g. on my thinkpad, it would *not* necessarily stretch, but
simply show a smaller region in the middle of the screen.
> If I change my freevo.conf to *my* default of 1440x900 and do
> everything else the same way, will I get images and icons displayed
> correctly? No, I don't.
That depends on your definition of "correctly". Recall that the image regions
defined in the skin are given in pixels that mean sth. like "percent". Thus,
if the scaling ratio is larger in one dimension than in the other, I would
expect images to be stretched.
> Images are still stretched and, if I'm
> understanding your contention, these pictures shouldn't be. However,
> if I change the third line in any skin from 'geometry="800x600">' to
> 'geometry="1440x900">' then I get nice, pretty, properly displayed
> images and icons, although everything is shoved into the top left
> corner. So why isn't the skinning engine correctly displaying images
> at the intended size and shape?
For displaying images at the "intended" size and shape, it would be necessary
to know it. Looking at the skin files, I only see <image> elements either
without a size set (I assume width,height are then read from the file) or
with both set. Now how should the skin engine display the images? One
straightforward interpretation is width*hori_factor, height*vert_factor. As
hori_factor and vert_factor differ, the image becomes stretched.
What you obviously want, is that the aspect ratio of some images (not all,
e.g. the background image) to be retained. This could be done by some kind
of "maxfit" algorithm, e.g. centering the image within the specified
rectangle. AFAICS, there is not much information about what you want that
Freevo currently gets from the skin .fxd files.
Speaking of that, I wonder if it is intentional that object.width and
object.height are not handled alike in area.py, lines 395 and 398. The
object.width looks very strange to me actually, as if an " + self.area_val.x"
was missing in there.
Your sought formula is no black magic. Given an image file with either square
pixels or a known aspect ratio, it is trivial to display it correctly *given
enough information*:
- The screen resolution and size (-> aspect ratio can be computed) can be
queried from X, but note that Freevo is not X-only and these values would
have to pass an intermediate layer. (But it would be easy to add an
additional "displaysize" parameter to freevo.conf, with the mm width&height
in analogy to the "DisplaySize" option in the "Monitor" section of
xorg.conf.)
- The scaling mode (e.g. fit width to height, vice versa or maxpect /
fillarea)
I see absolutely no need for anamorphic skins or for pre-scaled images though.
Creating 16:9 skins is a different matter, that could make sense AFAICS
because other layouts become more feasible.
After writing all this, I see Jean-Michel mention Panorama to be an anamorphic
skin. I don't know much about the old skin engine (which is about to change
a lot for Freevo2 anyways), but this looks like a workaround for displays
(e.g. the mentioned UK ones) where the actual screen size is not known and
the resolution aspect is 4:3. I would hope that using a real 16:9 skin and
configuring `geometry` in /etc/freevo.conf to be the 4:3 aspect would also
help, but all that depends on the ability to scale images "correctly", which
has the two abovementioned requirements that "correctly" is defined (i.e. in
the skin) and that the skin engine has enough knowledge about the display.
--
Ciao, / / .o.
/--/ ..o
/ / ANS ooo
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/
_______________________________________________ Freevo-devel mailing list Freevo-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-devel
