I need help! I have many videos where the original AR and the derived AR differ in the Header Information of the mkv file. In all Players ( Zoomplayer, VLC, Windows Movieplayer etc. the derived AR is used. But I cannot get the NU Player to do that nor the "Standard Player". So I always get "Egg Heads". Can somebody tell me what I should change in the settings!?
Trying to figure out what the problem could be here - I know about DAR, SAR & PAR but these days, SAR & PAR are largely redundant since we use square pixels these days - never heard of Derived Aspect Ratio - do these files have non square pixels? If, as I suspect these are DVD rips with SAR of 4:3 and DAR of 16:9 then if you hit the menu button while playing, you can choose 16:9 as the aspect ratio and the player will it for that particular file. If I'm wrong, can you give an example? (by the way, just for info, Nuplayer & Native Player are for streaming media only and have no effect on local playback)
Thank you for responding! I am using ZMBC as the wrapper with "use external player" enabled. The problematic movies use an "anamorphic" format, so the squared pixel are stretched during playback (E.G.: 720x568 becomes 820x568 ). Since in older movies black borders can be cropped the desired format is not necessarily 4:3 or 16:9.
Right gotcha - so yes, that's the same thing - unfortunately as far as I can see, the Zidoo does not honour the DAR flag, it goes by the SAR which is kind of expected since it all went SMPTE a while ago - it's not the greatest player for legacy stuff I'm afraid. I haven't used ZDMC for quite a while either now (it was deprecated in favour of HT2) and in fact I don't have it installed any more so can't check - but I would assume there must be an on the fly aspect setting in there somewhere...?
Hi Mark, the guy says he uses Zidoo player with ZDMC so any picture controls during playback are just the same as with HT2. It’s a shame you can’t set SD content to play in software, then the aspect ratio could be controlled by Kodi (ZDMC) with HD and UHD continuing to use hardware processing.
Using ZMDC with the internal player shows the correct AR but playback stutters even for Standard Definition movies!
Apologies if I'm stating the obvious here, but you have to be careful with "internal" & "external" players in ZDMC. Internal player means the ZDMC "internal" player, ie the Kodi software player which is most definitely not optimised for Android! External player means the Zidoo "internal" player, ie the one use by HT2. So as @DaMacFunkin correctly says above, you can access all the same controls the same way as you can with HT2, including aspect ratio. To summarise - with ZDMC, always chose "External" player which is the default.
Sorry for my ambiguous statemanet I meant the ZMDC Kodi player and used it only to test! In ZMDC "use external player" is set as standard. It is realy a shame that the Zidoo cannot cope with anamorphic files. This means I have to go thru some 7.000 movies to check which are anamorphic and then to reencode.
So if you choose "Full" in the aspect ratio settings, does that not work? .. just realised, probably not since you say some of the files are not only anamorphic, but also cropped... I'm going to try cropping one of my anamorphic dvd rips and see what happens...
So unfortunately after all this too and fro, anamorphic cropped videos are definitely not supported - I just encoded a 720x576 anamorphic 2.35 film to a cropped 720x424 anamorphic file and there's no way to view it correctly - it doesn't honour DAR and there's no way to do a "horizontal fit" manually. On the up side, where I can encode 4K H.265 movies at maybe 70fps, a standard def runs at about 800fps into H.264 so it doesn't take long. I use Staxrip with an Nvidia card in hardware which could be scripted to process a whole load of files at once. On the down side, if you had to encode 7000 2 hour movies, that's about 18 days encoding flat out
It is not the encoding I am worried about, because as you say using STAXrip and Nvidia encodes very fast. It is finding the anamorphic movies. Unless there is a software which scans all the movies in batch ( which I dont know of) I would have to open every single one to find out.
There is a CLI for mediainfo - not had a look, but that would be a starting point - there has to be a utility somewhere that does it!
I would also email support to ask if they can implement DAR in the player, or even a custom zoom or horizontal aspect fit... It's certainly worth a conversation.
In the meantime I have had several e-mails back and forth. I have sent them samples of anmorphic videos, but from their response I get the impression they have never heard about DAR and those items and one begins to doubt their technical competence! All they did is telling me I could adjust the display manually during playback. This helps in some cases, but there are many where it distorts the picture even more. Too bad one cannot use the ZMDC player for those files, because it stutters. The Zidoo is by now the only player I have come across which has this fault
It would be easier if they would simply add other aspect ratios that we can switch to no matter what the video header says. That shouldn't be very difficult, even VLC can do it. I found the only way to watch these 2.35:1 videos was to switch to "Original" aspect ratio, then use the zoom functions on mt TV to stretch the video across the screen. I'd much prefer the Z9S allow me to do it there. Dan
