As described in this Reddit post, several channels in my area seem to be broadcasting with the wrong aspect ratio. The problem is not caused by HDHomeRun or with Plex, but either of them could solve it if I could just choose the DAR on the player.
I’ve searched the forums and seen others post about this, but they rarely get any response. Is Plex dead? This should be a pretty simple option to add to the player on all platforms.
The channels come through looking like this:
They can easily be corrected using ffmpeg to look like this, but that doesn’t help when viewing live TV:
EDIT: After getting no help from HDHomeRun (who basically said “it’s the station’s fault, call them”), I was investigating the Plex apps on various devices, and I’ve found that this is partially implemented in some places but is not implemented at all in others:
- The Android app has a slider under “Playback Settings” with the label of “Display Mode” (which sometimes shows up and sometimes doesn’t) with options of Original, Stretch, Letterbox, and Zoom that can alter the aspect ratio. However, “Stretch” fills the screen, so on a phone like mine that is wider than 16:9, it stretches them too much. Also, shows that should be 4:3 but are broadcast in 16:9, there is no way to narrow back to 4:3.
- The Windows app doesn’t seem to have any options to control aspect ratio, but it does have a button to zoom to fill the width of the screen, and the top/bottom are cropped off.
- The web app has no options that I can find for the aspect ratio at all.
- The Roku app has no options that I can find for aspect ratio. However, on some Roku TVs (but not my Roku player) you can hit * to go into Picture Settings > Advanced Settings > Picture Size, which has Auto, Direct, Normal, Stretch, and Zoom. These are basically equivalent to the 4 options that the Android version of the Plex app has, and they are not sufficient to fix all of the channels (like the 4:3 being shown in 16:9).
I may be speaking into a vacuum as it appears Plex is no longer improving their product or replying to anything, but here is what I would suggest:
- The option for Display Mode should be in all apps. It already is implemented similarly to the CSS object-fit property:
– fill is implemented by your “Stretch” option
– contain is implemented by your “Letterbox” option
– cover is implemented by your “Zoom” option
– either none or scale-down is probably your “Original” option - We need an additional option for Aspect Ratio in addition to Display Mode to correct media that is already encoded with the wrong DAR like these live stations. I think this should allow a custom text input ratio like 16:9 or 4:3, but if nothing else, at least give a preset list of options similar to those in VLC:
– Default
– 16:9
– 4:3
– 1:1
– 16:10
– 2.21:1
– 2.35:1
– 2.39:1
– 5:4 - While not necessary for my situation, a third option for “Crop” that would work like VLC would be nice as well. This way, you could take a broadcast that is letterboxed for 16:9 but the content is 4:3 and crop off the letterbox, and combined with the “zoom” Display Mode above, you could zoom in to fill the screen with the cropped content (without the encoded letterboxing). This would also be beneficial with Blu-Ray movies that are letterboxed on the top and bottom, so that they could be automatically cropped to 2.35:1 and then zoomed to fill the screen at 16:9 (cropping off the left and right edges). If matching VLC’s implementation, this would have the same input choices as Aspect Ratio above (plus 5:3).
EDIT: I was advised by customer service to add this to Feature Suggestions so that people could vote on it. Based on the lack of responses, looks like we’re going to be out of luck unless lots of people chime in. Shame on you, Plex.
