This question may not belong here as it is quite specific to mplayer. I can't find any good mplayer specific forums so I ask you to please redirect me if you know of a better source of information.
Anyway here it goes:
I have a problem playing video in fullscreen (-fs) mode using mplayer. The video gets squashed vertically. When I launch mplayer from the console I can see Mplayer correctly reads the actual unscaled video dimension as 640x352. The weird thing is a few lines later it sets up a video window for playback with the dimension 952x390. Now, my screen mode is 952x518 so mplayer nails it horizontally but fails vertically. I just can't figure out why it sets the vert size to 390. Makes no sense at all. I can't find any references to 390 anywhere (xf86conf etc...). A proper uniform scale would give something like 524px vertically. The only thing I can think of is that Mplayer is unable to set up a video window that exceeds the size of my screen. My screen being 952x518 and a proper scale would give 952x524. It seems a little far fetched...
I see this problem when using xv and xvidix video output but not when using x11 which scales the image correctly but unfortunately is not an option as it is too processor intensive for my system.
I have tried manual scaling using -y option but the results aren't good at all. Infact the results are quite unpredictable as -y seems to affect both H and V size of the video window.
Any ideas?
UPDATE:
Seems this was the simplest thing in the world to solve. Just add -monitoraspect x when launching mplayer. Where x=16:9 or 4:3.
Example:
mplayer -fs -zoom -quiet -monitoraspect 16:9 -vo xv themovie.avi