Sony Bravia EX715/716

[OlliL]

Hi,

The problem
I always had problems with the playback of different kind of videos on my Sony Bravia 40EX716. 16:9 videos where displayed with a black bar on top and bottom, 4:3 videos where stretched to max-width and so on - multiple problems.

UMS.conf

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codec_spec_script = container == mkv :: -aspect 4:3\ncontainer == avi :: -lavcopts aspect=16/9 -oac copy -mc 0

In the past I often used things like "-aspect 4:3" for MKVs or "-lavcopts aspect=16/9" for AVIs and so on but this "solutions" are always croping parts of the video on both sides away, or do not fix stretching of real 4:3 videos.


The solution

After hours of testing, restarting UMS, testing and restarting UMS (my wife got crazy with my obsession of fixing this! At the end I hade a mencoder wrapper which was able to modify the given flags without restarting UMS ) I came up with this solution:

UMS.conf:

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#false for not falling back to tsMuxer
mencoder_mux_compatible = false
# :2 is needed for some extrem "short" videos like aspect 2.35:1 which otherwise would create a green bar on the verry top
# of the screen the strange scale is needed to avoid some "auto" screen adjustments on the TV which makes all wrong. 
# 1276:720 also works but cuts parts of the screen away on the left and right. tested with 4:3, 16:9, 16:10 and 2.35:1 videos
mencoder_decode =  -vf softskip,expand=::::1:16/9:2,scale=1283:720 -lavcopts aspect=16/9

This is tested with videos of the following dimensions:
720x302, 2.35:1, 25.000 FPS (this one needed the :2 at the end of expand=)

352x240, 3:2, 23.976 FPS

320x240, 4:3, 29.970 FPS
480x360, 4:3, 23.976 FPS
720x540, 4:3, 25.000 FPS

800x500, 16:10, 25.000 FPS

1280x720, 16:9, 23.976 FPS
624x352, 16:9, 25.000 FPS


I did not tested it with x1080 videos as I do not have any. It could be "improved" to only scale the video to the next needed resolution, but then someone would need to find out all working resolutions, and upscaling everything to 720p on my AMD-E350 system causes no problem CPU-wise.
1276x720 works as well (but cuts parts of the screen on both sides away), but everything between 1276 and 1283 does not work. It looks like this uneven "resolution" stops doing some weird things on the TV.

Using codec_spec_script could also change the result as this places the arguments on different positions in the commandline and I'm not sure that this may not change something in how mencoder interprets them (as later parameters override previous parameters).

I also had to remove some parameters from the cmdline completly as they are causing stutering and video/audio de-synchronisation but this might be my setup at home:

/usr/local/bin/mencoder

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#!/usr/bin/perl -w

foreach $i (0 .. $#ARGV) {
        $ARGV[$i]=~s/:vrc_maxrate=[0-9]*//g;
        $ARGV[$i]=~s/:vrc_buf_size=[0-9]*//g;
}

system("/usr/local/bin/mencoder.orig",@ARGV);

This removes vrc_maxrate and vrc_buf_size

My Sony Screen configuration
HOME -> Settings -> Display -> Screen:
- Screen Format: Wide
- Auto Format : Off
- Display Area : +1

My System
CPU: AMD E350 (1.6Ghz)
RAM: 4GB
Harddisk: crucial CT064M4SSD2 SSD (only for OS, videos are played from an 1GBit NFS mount)
OS: FreeBSD 9.1, UMS is running in a Jail
UMS Version: 2.3.0
Java: OpenJDK Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_011-b21)
MEncoder: SVN-r35040-snapshot-4.7.3

[Impee]

Hi OlliL,

I'm just writing this reply to say "thank you" for your great and laborious work.

I have an EX711 and was using the "-vf softskip,expand=:::::16/9,dsize=4/3" option for quite a time. All things went well until i began to play mkv instead of avi. I also started changing options, but the number of combinations are allmost infinite ... and my wife began to got crazy as well.

I then stumbled upon this topic which guided me towards the solution. I only needed to make a few changes:
1) I needed to replace "mencoder_decode" by "CustomMencoderOptions". Otherwise, UMS does not pass the options/overrides to Mencoder.
2) There is no "+1" value for "display area" of "Network Video" on the EX711. I chose "high definition" instead.

I'm now using these settings for more than 10 days. As from then, no black borders, stretching or cropping anymore.
I really appreciate your input and your willingness to share your results with other users.

Impee.