16:9 videos playing as 4:3

[sjtaylor84]

Hi there,

Whenever I play a video using media player on xp (with graphics accelleration on or off) if a video is supposed to be 16:9 ratio it plays as 4:3 and looks squashed. How do I fix this?

Thanks in advance

Simon

[admin]

Is this a Media Player question? My guess is there's some setting somewhere, it makes very little sense for this to have anything to do with Fusion.

[mtatmc]

I suppose it is possible that his XP VM is not set to a 16:9 aspect ratio - I frequently run a small VM at say 800x640 or 1024x768 even though my Mac's are running a 16:9 resolution.

[admin]

Sure, but (not having used it, I assume) Media Player should be smart enough to play video at the proper aspect ratio regardless of the apparent monitor dimensions.

[sjtaylor84]

I tried playing the same files on a native windows machine and they play fine, the windows machine i have is a 4:3 screen too and media player still plays the files at 16:9. Would it make any difference that the files look like anamorphic widescreen as opposed to an actual rectangular video?

[mtatmc]

As an experiment you might try installing a copy of quicktime or realplayer and see if they get the aspect correct. If they do that pretty much tells us it is a specifically Windows Media Player issue (alone or in relation to Fusion in some weird way).

Another experiment would be to give your entire VM a 16:9 ratio and see what WMP does then.

[sjtaylor84]

Thanks, looks like it's a wmp problem, thing is I have to use wmp as the videos are DRM from a BBC video on demand service and no other player will play them. Any other ideas? :-s This is actually one of the main reasons I'm using Fusion

[mtatmc]

Sorry, out of ideas. ;^(

Were you able to try setting the VM to 16:9?

[sjtaylor84]

I've tried it all in fullscreen mode, resolution 1440x900, is that what you mean? Is there a way of contacting vmware direct about this without having to pay for support?

[admin]

Is your VM up to date with patches? You could also change the pixel ratio under Tools > Options > Devices > Display > Properties (might want to check what it is on the working native computer).

[sjtaylor84]

Thanks, that sort of worked but now the video's playing really slowly

[faniculi]

Just wondering if anyone else has seen this issue or found any sort of workaround. I am in the same boat - I use VMWare Fusion very often to download and watch BBC iPlayer content. Under version 1.x and 2.x the video always plays in 4:3 aspect ration regardless of the ratio listed in the media file. I have never seen this problem while running a native Windows machine or when running Windows under Boot Camp. I can only assume that VMWare has an issue with the scaling on the display driver or has some sort of issue with passing the aspect ratio data from the media file to WMP.

Previously I was running a Boot Camp volume and opening it under VMWare. Now I have reinstalled Windows as a VM only and do not have Boot Camp running at all. In any case, the results are always the same: run Windows under Boot Camp or play iPlayer content on a real Windows box and aspect ratios are picked up correctly in WMP. Play iPlayer content through my VM and the aspect ratio is always 4:3. Most annoying.

The suggestion above (changing the display aspect ratio directly through WMP) sort of works, but the playback quality suffers a lot. In addition, this workaround requires me to change the display aspect manually for each new video aspect I want to play.

If anyone has any advice or ideas on how to work around this one it would be much appreciated. In my opinion, this is a serious enough bug in VMWare to warrant a fix, but honestly, I can't afford to spend $25 just to report it to them.

Thanks very much,

-N-