Store More Specific Aspect Ratio Information (2.35:1, 1.85:1, 16:9, 4:3, etc)

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I would like a field for aspect ratio, which is not pulled form the moviefile 
itself. Since only 4:3 and 16:9 aspects can be read, I would like a field which 
can read the correct aspect from a database, e.g. from a mymovies.xml file, 
which has the exact aspect ratio information, i.e. 2.40:1, 2.35:1, 1.85:1, 16:9 
4:3 etc.
This information is important to me, since I don't like to watch cinemascope 
movies on my TV, only on my 2.35:1 constant height projector screen. 
PLEASE make a field for these info, and then the skin makers can make a 
suitable icon :-)

Original issue reported on code.google.com by jacob.ba...@gmail.com on 25 Feb 2011 at 9:26

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I'm sorry but we are not going to add a second aspect ratio field. We HAVE 
considered  altering the mediainfo logic so that it stores more specific aspect 
ratio information like you describe rather than just "widescreen" or 
"fullscreen". But currently we are using the mediainfo logic provided by 
MediaPortal. 

I will leave this open though and if it gets enough attention then we will add 
more granularity to the aspect ratio logic.

Original comment by conrad.john on 25 Feb 2011 at 3:27

• Changed title: Store More Specific Aspect Ratio Information (2.35:1, 1.85:1, 16:9, 4:3, etc)
• Changed state: Accepted
• Added labels: Component-GUI, Component-Importer, Priority-Medium

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Would it be possible to allow a grapper to overwrite the existing field with 
more accurate data, if available (or manually overwrite/enter the data) - and 
not have mediainfo overwrite it back again?

Original comment by jacob.ba...@gmail.com on 28 Feb 2011 at 9:04

[GoogleCodeExporter]

No, that is not the purpose of a scraper script. The file info we store is 
factual information based on scanning the file on disk and it should not be 
modifiable by a script meant to import movie meta data. Even if we were to 
implement this via some ugly hack, the data would just get overwritten as soon 
as a mediainfo scan was performed. 

Original comment by conrad.john on 28 Feb 2011 at 9:30

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I guess I will have to manually enter the aspect ratio in the description text 
then...
Loosing the database would loose this info, though :-(

Original comment by jacob.ba...@gmail.com on 28 Feb 2011 at 10:13

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Far as I know the height and width information from MediaInfo scan are 
available to the skin. And I thought that skins were able to do math now, so is 
it not possible at skin level to load 235.png after calculations on 1280/544 
result in 2.35?

Maybe it is better to do this at plugin level, but I thought it was already 
possible in current situation to do it with the skin.

Ignore me otherwise

Original comment by RoChess....@gmail.com on 28 Feb 2011 at 10:14

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I am sorry, I understand your request and it is a reasonable one. There are a 
lot of things people would like to see changed with Moving Pictures though. We 
have over 120 enhancement requests on this tracker right now and we have to 
prioritize by what is most important to the most number of people. 

As this is the first time this issue has been brought up, unless someone makes 
a patch or people suddenly start feeling very passionate about this, it 
probably wont happen right away.

Original comment by conrad.john on 28 Feb 2011 at 10:17

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Regarding comment 5:
The cinemascope movies are unfortunately not anamorphic, which means there are 
black lines at the top and botton in the videosignal, filling up from 
2.35:1/2.40:1 to 16:9.
So mediainfo reads 1280 x 720 for 16:9 as well as cinemascope aspect 720P 
movies.

I guess the whole issue mainly is interesting for Home Theater owners like 
myself running a constant height projector setup, with masking. 
I would like to know before I start the movie what the aspect will be, so I can 
prepare the masking.
And then there is the impress factor - nothing like a cinemascope movie on your 
2.40:1 wide screen :-)

Original comment by jacob.ba...@gmail.com on 28 Feb 2011 at 10:38

[GoogleCodeExporter]

If your super wide screen videos have black bars encoded in the top and bottom 
then it would be impossible to automatically detect the aspect ratio with 
current methods, which makes this conversation moot. In that situation the only 
possibility is to turn off mediainfo functionality and manually enter the value 
yourself.

Original comment by conrad.john on 28 Feb 2011 at 10:53

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Which leads me back to my request of the possibility to get this info from a 
movie database, rather than mediainfo (or an option).
Mymovies has it (you can see it attached) and IMDB has the info as well (but I 
don't know whether a IMDB scrapper script can get it).

Original comment by jacob.ba...@gmail.com on 28 Feb 2011 at 11:24

Attachments:

• mymovies.xml

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Jacob, imdb does not know what version you have. It would be kinda silly to 
scrape aspect-ratio from imdb.com for a pan&scan fullscreen DVD of the same 
movie that is being imported.

Example DVD to import: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000F6IOBQ

With your idea, a user will see 2.35:1 inside MovingPictures, based on the 
aspect-ratio scraped from: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401855/, but their 
actual movie-media aspect-ratio is 1.33:1.

So the proper way (and easiest) is to rely on the actual movie-media you have, 
which makes MediaInfo the way to go. This means you have to use the height and 
width of your media, as the only other aspect-ratio related info available is a 
simple fullscreen vs widescreen indication.

I've seen skins that show the actual aspect ratio, so they must be using 
skin-math based on the height/width values to get this info.

You can do the same indirectly with category filters. For example you can 
create a 'cinemascope movies' filter that contains a '720p' subfilter in which 
you define width = 1280 and height is smaller then 600. This will show any 
2.13:1 movie or larger (such as 2.78:1), you can do the same for '1080p' 
(height smaller then 510). You can then also exclude those movies from your 
normal categories, to differentiate between the movies you watch on projector 
and other means.

Original comment by RoChess....@gmail.com on 28 Feb 2011 at 11:58

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Sorry Jacob but we will never allow a scraper script to populate technical 
information about a video file, that is NOT the purpose of our scraper system. 
As far as I am concerned, if you have copies of videos with black bars on the 
top and bottom you have bad rips. There is absolutely no reason to encode a 
video in this manner and I have never seen anyone that knew what they were 
doing rip a video in this way. For any proper rip the width and height of the 
video file should be a reliable way to check the aspect ratio. 

I understand that for some people MORE DETAILED aspect ratio information may be 
desired. For those people the solution is to simply store more information when 
we grab this information from the video file. Again this is something I am 
willing to consider, but for the reasons stated above I am hesitant. If enough 
people are interested in this change it will happen, but simply suggesting an 
inferior but alternate solution will not change my mind.

Original comment by conrad.john on 1 Mar 2011 at 4:34

• Changed state: Tentative

[GoogleCodeExporter]

[deleted comment]

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Quote: 
"As far as I am concerned, if you have copies of videos with black bars on the 
top and bottom you have bad rips. There is absolutely no reason to encode a 
video in this manner and I have never seen anyone that knew what they were 
doing rip a video in this way."
Maybe if you rip and transcode/re-encode your movies. 
I, however, only have digital backups of original DVDs and Blu-Rays. 
Anamorphic encoding can be used to take advantage of the all available pixels 
in the given format (like 720x480 for SD NTSC) when the movie is wider than 4:3 
(720x480 is actually 1.5:1, but the NTSC TV pixels were non-square: taller than 
they were wide, resulting in a 4:3 picture on the tv screen. Computer monitors 
have square pixels, complicating the understanding of legacy video formats). 
So 16:9 NTSC SD movies are encoded in a 1.5:1 pixelformat, but with an 
"anamorphic widescreen" flag which tells the player to play the video signal in 
16:9 during playback (by re-inserting the black bars on 4:3 screens or by 
stretching the 1.5:1 signal on Widescreens) - resulting in a correctly 
proportioned picture.

On original DVD and Blu-Rays, anything WIDER than 16:9 will have black bars 
encoded - Cinemascope (2.35:1) is unfortunately NOT encoded anamorphically on 
neither DVD nor Blu-Ray; 16:9 is the widest anamorphic encoding (see 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamorphic_widescreen).
Related, many Disney cartoons have an aspect ratio of 1.66:1. These will 
normally be encoded anamorphically with black bars on the sides - so they will 
show up in mediainfo as Widescreen, even though they only are 1.66:1.

Transcoders will NOT encode anamorphically (meaning using the whole 16:9 frame 
available, e.g. 1280x720 or 1920x1080, and stretching the picture vertically to 
fill the frame)- they will simply encode a frame with less height, e.g. 
1280x545 for a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, by removing the black bars in the encoding. 
This saves a bit of space, but not a whole lot, as all the lines a black which 
makes it very simple for the codec - all frames on these top and bottom lines 
are the same as the previous. No change = no new information needs to be 
encoded. You can test this in your favorite encoder: try to encode with and 
without cropping the black bars in a cinemascope movie = almost identical size 
files. 
The down side to cropping before encoding is that not all mediaplayers are able 
to read the aspect ratio flag by all encoders and will therefor stretch the 
none-16:9 encoded video to 16:9. This problems seems to be disappearing 
nowadays, though (I experienced this on my 2gen Zune 3-4 years ago, using some 
but not all encoders).

Bottom line: I DON'T RE-ENCODE/TRANSCODE BUT RIP TO 100 % IDENTICAL COPIES => 
black bars WILL exist as in the original on wider than 16:9 rips, but the 
aspect ratio will show up as 16:9 in mediainfo on all the movies (have not seen 
any 4:3 recently - only TV and older movies) 
Therefor, media info of width and height is simply not the way to go 
(alone/only).

Original comment by jacob.ba...@gmail.com on 7 Mar 2011 at 2:21

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Jacob, we currently automatically grab the aspect ratio from the file's media 
info, and in the Movie Manager you can manually override this information. This 
gives you a large amount of flexibility and in the future we will consider 
adding more granular aspect ratio information.

As I stated above we will NOT allow scraper scripts to populate media 
information such as aspect ratio. This is outside the scope of it's function 
and could easily lead to users with incorrect data in their database. 

Original comment by conrad.john on 7 Mar 2011 at 4:04

[GoogleCodeExporter]

I'd just like Moving pictures to calculate AR from the width + height and then 
round it into a proper format.

Example

< 1 = 1.0-
1 to 1.415 = 1.33
1.415 > to 1.5505 = 1.50
1.5505 to 1.635 = 1.61
1.635 to 1.72 = 1.66
1.72 to 1.815 = 1.78
1.815 to 2.1 = 1.85
2.1 to 2.37 = 2.35
2.37 to 2.395 = 2.39
2.395 2.45 = 2.40 
> 2.45 = 2.5+

These would be represented by skin with the following graphics
[blank],4:3,3:2,16:10,5:3,16:9,1.85:1,2.35:1,2.35:1,2.4:1,SuperWide

Original comment by kiwijung...@gmail.com on 6 Jun 2013 at 3:09

[GoogleCodeExporter]

Obviously if you are calculating from a VIDEO_TS or bluray iso etc, then you 
would have a different calculation, because they often use anamorphic

Original comment by kiwijung...@gmail.com on 6 Jun 2013 at 3:11