Suggestion: Options for screen Stretch / Fit / Fill

[elscire]

My Situation

As a widescreen user, I really appreciate the work you guys have done recently to support more resolutions without distortion. Thanks! It works great for floating screens like the balcony, but for 'fixed' screens like the lounge or the cinemas it's actually made things worse for me in some ways!

My main use for Bigscreen is watching anime with people. I have a 21:9 screen, but anime is almost always only 16:9

Previously, to watch 16:9 video on the 16:9 theater screen I could set my media player application to stretch the video to fit the whole screen. This would look horribly fat and wide in 'real life' on my physical wide screen, but in Bigscreen it filled the whole screen and also looked correct as Bigscreen squished it back down to 16:9.

Now, on a fixed screen, 16:9 content is both pillarboxed (by my own monitor) and letterboxed (by bigscreen) resulting in black bars both on the top and on the sides and a tiny viewing area :(

See the screenshot for what I get when trying to watch 16:9 content on the lounge screen (ignore the bigscreen window)

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=795572973

My Suggestion

My suggestion would be to add options to the Bigscreen client to determine how the screen is displayed in those rooms which have a "fixed" screen.

Fit
The desktop is made as big as possible so you can still see it all and without distorting it (this seems to be the current behaviour)

Stretch
The desktop is stretched to fit the screen exactly (possible distortion, no cropping)

Fill
The desktop is scaled so that all of the screen is filled (no distortion, possible cropping)

Fill would be immediately perfect for me as it would mean that the areas cropped away when watching 16:9 video are the bits at the side which are black anyway!

Fit would be a great option for anyone trying to watch any video with any resolution monitor, as it gives people the power and flexibility to use the stretch/scale/aspect ratio options on their own media player application to get things lookiing how they need to be.

Hopefully not a horrible suggestion! Anyone else out there having similar issues? Let's hear about it :)

[hyperion]

That is an interesting side effect of our widescreen support!

Could you try changing your monitor's resolution in either of these places:
https://imgur.com/a/XSBVW and see if that works? That could be a short term fix.

Longer term we may look into being able to change the Windows resolution from within Bigscreen which would solve your problem.

[elscire]

Yes, changing my resolution definitely does allow things to display as desired. The suggestion was because I would prefer not to change it! It's nice to be able to enjoy the ultrawide aspect ratio in normal use when not presenting, and when presenting in any environment which does not have a fixed screen.

I guess I'm in the minority here in that I'd much rather spend time messing around with my media player to get things right rather than changing my desktop resolution back and forth, because that always seems to mess something up in terms of window positioning, VM scaling, or remote desktop connection sizing where I do most of my work.

Still, thank you for taking a look, I hope you find the information useful.

[hyperion]

Its good feedback, definitely something we hadn't considered. We may look into a toggle for this if we find people are running into the problem a lot, or, as I mentioned above, making Bigscreen handle changing the res of your desktop for you automatically.