Stretch as Deafult Please!

[Sennerz]

Hi Jellyfin,

I am currently working on a little retro project consisting of Jellyfin with all my retro 80's and 90's TV Shows & Movies on an old 4:3 CRT TV. All of my media is in 4:3 format which is then sent through Amazon Firestick, into an HDMI to SCART and then into the CRT TV. Everything is working great, Jellyfin is providing a great experiece BUT I have one last problem, as follows...

As the HDMI to SCART is chucking out a 16:9 signal, even though the videos are 4:3 and the CRT TV is 4:3, the signal becomes a 16:9 again due to the HDMI to SCART conversion, resulting in a small picture with black bars at the sides. Jellyfin's 'Stretch' option works a treat to get the picture to display correctly, filling the screen without the black bars. However, every time I play something I have to click 'Stretch' and it's becoming very annoying.

Could we please have the option to select a default viewing mode? If I could set & forget to 'Stretch' for everything, my project would be complete and exactly how I want it. I could seemlesly switch between series or episodes and everything would display correctly, it would be perfect!

I don't know if there is a workaround for this, I've looked and racked my brain but I can't come up with anyhting. If anyone knows of one please let me know.

Thanks
Andy

[TheDreadPirate]

AFAIK, there is no way to set Jellyfin for Android TV to always stretch nor set Android TV itself to always stretch or have a 4:3 output resolution. I found an old reddit post that asked a similar question and the OP ended up using Kodi, which they indicated does have an option to stretch 4:3 content.

Is that an option for you? I'm not entirely sure how Kodi works on Android TV. I've only used it on PC with the Jellyfin for Kodi plugin.

[bitmap]

Do you know the SAR and DAR of your media files? Any idea whether the DAR is respected by the Firestick or the SCART? What *should* happen is that the DAR should be 4:3, tell the Firestick to play it 4:3, that is transferred to the SCART as 4:3, and voila...but there's a failure somewhere in here.

I don't know how Jellyfin handles SAR/DAR or whether ANY client respects those when using Jellyfin, but that's the reason for this metadata to exist in the first place. I'd guess the SCART doesn't assert the aspect ratio of the device on the other end (i.e., your CRT) so the Firestick assumes 16:9 and that's the signal passed on. These are all assumptions, but I'm getting out of my depth as I've never used a SCART, I'm only passingly familiar with how PAR/SAR/DAR affect video playback, and Jellyfin appears to be functioning and this is a hardware issue instead...

[TheDreadPirate]

I know that there are circumstances where jellyfin applies the DAR when playing video. I don't recall what clients do that. Or if all clients do that.

90% certain the Jellyfin Android TV client uses DAR.

[Sennerz]

Thanks guys, I have used Kodi in the past on pc & Raspberry Pi but I've never really liked it and it's overkill for what I need. I really do prefer Jellyfin, it's so easy to use and looks great, it's just this one thing causing me a little problem. I know it's not Jellyfin doing anything wrong, the 'Stretch' option is actually doing a great job of correcting the issue that is coming from two device which don't support 4:3 (Fire Stick & HDMI to SCART Converter). If I could just select 'Stretch' to be the default... or Stretch be remembered and stay on until something else is selected, it would be amazing!

I like Jellyfin so much that I will probably just put up with the issue but I just thought I'd ask if the feature could be added.

[Sennerz]

To be honest I don't even know what DAR is. I'm not too clued up on all this stuff, although I am a technical, geeky type with a background in retro gaming & emulation builds etc, this is the first thing I've done in years and wanted it to be as simple as possible, which it has been with Jellyfin. My project is 99.9% done which is great, I just which this last little annoyance could be sorted to make it 100% 😆

I know that there are circumstances where jellyfin applies the DAR when playing video.  I don't recall what clients do that.  Or if all clients do that. 

90% certain the Jellyfin Android TV client uses DAR.

[TheDreadPirate]

Check out the comment in this Jellyfin feature request.

https://features.jellyfin.org/posts/372/...pect-ratio

[Sennerz]

Oh, that looks very interesting and although I don't fully understand it, it does sound like a similar situation and that it might work. I'll save it and try and get my head around it & learn how to do what is suggested. 

Thanks a lot 👍

Check out the comment in this Jellyfin feature request.

https://features.jellyfin.org/posts/372/...pect-ratio

[bitmap]

To be honest I don't even know what DAR is. I'm not too clued up on all this stuff, although I am a technical, geeky type with a background in retro gaming & emulation builds etc, this is the first thing I've done in years and wanted it to be as simple as possible, which it has been with Jellyfin. My project is 99.9% done which is great, I just which this last little annoyance could be sorted to make it 100% 😆

Using a tool like mediainfo or ffprobe, you can find metadata information on SAR and DAR by default. As far as I can tell, PAR=SAR for ffmpeg tools as well as mediainfo.

• PAR (Pixel Aspect Ratio) is the width of a single pixel compared to the height in a ratio. Very important with 480i and 576i (NTSC and PAL) interlaced content, which use tall (height > width) pixels and fat pixels (width > height), respectively. For most modern, progressive scan content, this ratio is 1:1 (square pixels). Bad conversion can lead to 480i content squished
  when en/transcoded to progressive scan which might be happening in your setup. The effect is subtle.
  
• SAR (Sample Aspect Ratio) is, for all intents and purposes, the same as PAR as far as I know. I believe both mediainfo and ffprobe report SAR as pixel aspect ratio. The alternative definition, which doesn't make much sense as metadata, is the ratio of width to height in pixels, reduced to a standard value (e.g., 1.33:1 or 5:4).
  
• DAR (Display Aspect Ratio) is how media communicates the way it should be displayed. The DAR will generally be 4:3 or 16:9, but could be 5:4 for PAL/576i content or even crazier for ultra-wide aspect ratio films (think anamorphic or IMAX).
  

[TheDreadPirate]

Oh, that looks very interesting and although I don't fully understand it, it does sound like a similar situation and that it might work. I'll save it and try and get my head around it & learn how to do what is suggested. 

Essentially, they are modifying the parameters that ffmpeg uses with videos.  Instead of calling ffmpeg directly, Jellyfin is calling this wrapper script which calls ffmpeg + some parameters to stretch the video.

As they stated, this would only happen when transcoding since ffmpeg is only used when transcoding.