I’m using flowplayer to display videos having various display aspect ratios and pixel aspect ratios.
The size of the HTML element where the player is displayed in is 640×320, i.e. has a 16:9 aspect ratio.
My first question is: does flowplayer honour DARs (display aspect ratios) and/or PARs (pixel aspect ratio) metadata from the source video container (for example an MP4 container)? Quick tests indicate that this is not the case and only the width and height of the video frames are used, neglecting DAR and PAR. Is this true? I’ve searched through various forums / web but was not able to find a definitive answer to this.
As an example: I have a video with a frame size of 480×360 (a 4:3 AR), a PAR value of 104:59 (1.76) and DAR is 416:177 (2.35). Therefore, I would expect this video to be displayed as cinemascope (aspect ratio of 2.35) in flowplayer, with black bars (letterboxed) added at the top and bottom. However, flowplayer displays it as a 4:3 video, only considering the frame size of the input video. I have also tried changing the clip-option ‘scale’ to a different value but that did not help either.
Can someone confirm or deny this? If it is true, what would you guys usually do in such a case, i.e. having a wider-than-usual aspect ratio? Would you simply re-encode the video and changing the frame size accordingly so that the aspect ratio is maintained?
Regards,
Chris
It appears that you got your answer over on the flowplayer forums. For the sake of future visitors, the relevant thread:
Sounds like you’re stuck transcoding to a 1:1 aspect ratio.