Hi all,
I did some testing with MCE 2005 last night. I created an uncompressed AVI video containing a grid of 1024*768 pixels (each square 32*32 pixel) and played it in MCE using "intelligent zoom" on my 1360*768 LCD. Examining the resulting screenshot allowed me to determine the zoom/stretch values that are being used :
1) The image is zoomed by 9.1%, resulting in a slight cropping of the top and bottom portion of the picture.
2) The values used for the non-linear stretch can be found in the attached file (sorry for the poor quality... but it's readable !)
Looking at these results, I think that the reason the MCE implementation looks so smooth is because as you can see in the attachment, even the very center of the image is stretched by 8.9% (while in some implementation I think it remains totally untouched). This and the top/bottom cropping results in lower stretching values needed on the sides, therefore less noticeable distortion.
I don't know what I can do to help further and encourage one of the MP devs to implement this, but anything that can be done without programming knowledge should be ok ! Let me know !
Cheers,
Laurent