Resize windowed mode with fixed ratio & auto display (1 Viewer)

[Embercidal]

A few newbie questions i'm hoping I could get help with:

1. When changing from fullscreen to windowed mode (ALT+Enter), i'm taken back to the menu and need to click 'TV On' and the image again to see the TV, is it possible to simply keep displaying in windowed mode without having to 'TV On' etc ?
2. When I resize in windowed mode i'd like to keep the aspect ratio locked so that I dont stretch/skew the image, is this possible?
3. In windowed mode it displays the black bars at top and bottom, resizing the window just squashes the image, is it possible to cut these bars off?

Thanks in advance

 

[Paranoid Delusion]

When changing from fullscreen to windowed mode (ALT+Enter), i'm taken back to the menu and need to click 'TV On' and the image again to see the TV, is it possible to simply keep displaying in windowed mode without having to 'TV On' etc ?

Currently that is the only way MP will work without totally crashing out, currently Scythe42 is rewriting the DirectX MP code which may have an affect on this behaviour.

This may also fix your questions 2 and 3, until its complete and tested, we do not know what the new behaviour will be, but it should fix a lot of issues we currently have.

 

[Scythe42]

1. Requires some more D3D tweaks. To keep playback running regardless of how your window changes. Probably a 1.3.1 or 1.3.2 fix. I personally think this is a defect resulting of some D3D workarounds for other issues. Full D3D device handling rewrite is scheduled for 1.4.0 as this is a major rework and out of scope for a maintenance release. This will come with more general enhancements like the option of using of pixel shaders.

2. Working on this whyile we speak. Window can only be resized with keeping the aspect ratio as anything else makes no sense. This might cause problems for some skins or even plugins. I am currently testing this. It will be a config option to only allow resizing with keeping the aspect ratio that is checked by default. Unlikely anyone will need to turn this off in windowed mode, but you never know. So we keep backwards compatibility via an option for a few releases.

3. Depends if the black bars are part of the movie you are playing or not. Will happen as a 1.3.1, probably a side effect of fixing 1. In widowed mode the window will automatically resize to the size of the media played back (unless it cannot fit on the screen). You know this from VLC and other media players. If black bars are part of the movie there is not much we can do.

Windowed mode is currently not really good supported from a D3D perspective as most people run in full screen anyway (better performance).

In addition a new config switch will be introduced 1.3.1 creating a border less window, so you can run 1080p on 1080p monitor in windowed mode. Another side effect of fixing 1 for people who want to run windowed mode so they can have apps above it or working on a secondary screen. Multi display setups on Win still can only have one active full screen app and you cannot interact with other displays at the same time. You know this from games. So for 1080p a borderless window mode needs to added to solve this.

Area 51 testing of the current work starts in the next few days - any testers are welcome. The faster we can identify new or left issues, the faster it can go into master.

 

[tomtj]

All of this "Hard Hard" work and it worries me that Windows 8 will trash the whole effort. There is a lot to like in 1.3.1a by the way.

 

[Scythe42]

Win8 has no impact on this. D3D9 works like before, same goes for anything form related. Desktop Apps work exactly like before. Win8 just comes with a different default theme. But who cares, again no impact on MP itself how the decoration of a window looks.

That some Win8 "tweaks" will be added is a different thing, though... New OS, new tweaks or adjustments for stuff that actually changed.

And for the new component "Metro" we haven't yet made any real plans. Probably just some "Start Menu" optimisations that go nice with Metro. In fact you shoudln't have a lot of stuff, links and so on in a Start Menu folder, so Metro can properly leverage it and the user can define his tile.

But that's installer stuff. So we probably adjust the contents of the "Team MediaPortal" folder so it plays hand in hand with Win8 as well. No biggie. All software is currently doing this so apps show up in the right place with a tile and not 1000000000000000000s of tiles that shouldn't be there. No one cared for a long time as there was no reason to deal with it. Now it's a good time to bring it up to what it should be since a long time.