[wenggolph]

Hi, I'm not sure the following is a bug or a limitation of how Kodi or a dependency handles it.

Currently for movies in KODI there are the following aspect ratio categories:
1:1.33 | 1:1.37 | 1:1.66 | 1:1.78 | 1:1.85 | 1:2.20 | 1:2.35 | 1:2.40 | 1:2.55 | 1:2.76


As far as I can see the following notable ones are missing

- 1:2.00 aka Univisium (currently categorised as 1:1.85)
    This is an aspect ratio of surging popularity (especially for serials and streaming formats) lately.
    Some examples for feature films published in this aspect ratio:

    Vera Cruz (1954)
    Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)
    The Last Emperor (1987)
    20th Century Women (2016)
    Café Society (2016)
    Green Book (2018)
    Midsommar (2019)
    Another Round (2020)

- 1:1.19 (currently categorised as 1:1.33)
   This aspect ratio was used for some early sound films because of the sound track "eating into" the 1:1.33 full frame.
   Obsoleted by the Academy ratio (1:1.37) frame but still used for some modern films (artistic reasons).

   Some examples for feature films published in this aspect ratio:
     All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
     M (1931)
     The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933)
     The Lighthouse (2019)


- 1:1.00 (currently categorised as 1:1.33)
    There's only one feature film I know of shot in this ratio: Mommy (2014).
    However this is widely used for streaming content, social media videos to be viewed on both TV/laptop/desktop screens (landscape format) and mobile phones (portrait format).


Can anybody advise me as to how this is a bug, an "engine" limitation, an eligible feature request or if it can be achieved already?

[Klojum]

Currently for movies in KODI there are the following aspect ratio categories:

Those available aspect ratios are different for everyone, as they are reflecting the composition of the videos in your media collection. Depending on mostly the height of a video, those aspect ratios will differ. Any little change in the video's height, and the aspect ratio will change as well.

One thing you could do is set boundaries to a fixed set of aspect ratios if you want to search for videos with similar aspect ratios. I do something like that in my private Kodi video database tools.

It's not a bug. It's whatever the original movie maker had in mind (e.g. 16:9 or 21:9, or 4:3 for old tv/movies), and then there are the Netflix videos that are "designed" for the various mobile phone screens (18:9, 18.8:9, 19:9 etc). And then there are the fluctuating expertise of consumers creating their own versions of whatever, sometimes for unknown reasons adding black bars to create a 16:9 image...

So, there is no bug and it's not an ffmpeg limitation (Kodi's video engine). it's simply what Kodi is getting thrown at that differs per video.

[wenggolph]

Well, in my case I'm talking about sources of known fixed pixel dimensions.
It is this label shown alongside the labels for movie duration, resolution, video codec, audio codec, audio channels... (shown in the bottom right corner by default)
which lacks the categories.
This label doesn't show the exact aspect ratios anyway but categories (for instance 1:1.87323 will be labelled as 1:1.85 but also 1:2.021 which I'd like to change)


mediainfo for instance has a finer aspect ratio categorisation.

[wenggolph]

Hope this adds some more information:
The currently available aspect ratio categories listed above are common standard movie aspect ratios which are not retrieved from (arbitrarily sized) sources.

Now I'm arguing that there should be three more categories of common movie aspect ratios (which individually "ratioed" files will be assigned to by rounding).

[wenggolph]

Found the corresponding code section

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/blob/d324e7...#L589-L611

[Hitcher]

As you can see from the code notes we covered the most common ones.

cpp:
// Given that we're never going to be able to handle every single possibility in

// aspect ratios, particularly when cropping prior to video encoding is taken into account

// the best we can do is take the "common" aspect ratios, and return the closest one available.

But feel free to submit a patch.

[Hitcher]

Having looked deeper into 1:2.00 it seems to be very popular with streaming platforms these days so I was going to PR this myself when found someone beat me to it.

https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/20784