Serviio

Hi,
just installed the new 0.5 and now able to use both BD-Player and TV for watching the videos. And really grateful for this great piece of software.
However, I've found out that all the avi files I have with non-standard resolution are stretched vertically to 16x9 when played on '09 SONY Bravia (KDL-40W5500), while on BD-S370 they are fine. Any chance to fix it by configuration? Thanks for your advices. The media data are below

not now... and in future it'd have to be transcoded into a different resolution. Is there not a setting on the TV for different 'zooms' ?

Of course, I've tried all of them, none had black bars, and some were even worse distorted.
Anything I can help?
(I'll try a bit later with the older version to see how was it before)

I did on 0.4.2 and it's the same. Then I recalled suddenly I've seen something like this before on the board and here you are http://forum.serviio.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=699
UPD: To make a clean determination I've tried also PMS but it looks the same there. Looks like it's model specific. Could we unlucky guys have something like uncrop in the future?

If you work out the ffmpeg command and what files it should be applied to then anything is possible for future

The way some of these Sony devices render stuff can be quite surprising. As an aside, I've noticed that the BDP players seem to forcibly stretch 4:3 DVD disc content to 16:9. Then if you try to correct it with the TV, it will crop the edges off. A pretty huge oversight really...

I've made some digging and found e.g. http://linuxers.org/tutorial/how-pad-videos-using-ffmpeg. In short, there are two switches in ffmpeg to make the bars, --padtop and --padbottom, so this part is quite easy.

As to decision here is quite complicated. Playing with different DLNA servers I realized now that this particular TV model wants to have only standard resolutions, like, what is it by heart, 720x576 for PAL MPEG2 and 1920x1080 for h264. I am sure it's quite impossible to do h264 padding/uncropping on the fly (this functionality is included in multiAVCHD, the BluRay "mastering" program, and for average movie takes about 5 hours of Core Duo 2.8G). But I believe it may make sense to realize kind of global setting of like "switch on the padding to standard resolution" which actually will help to increase the Serviio compatibility list

Absolutely agree. I hit this on my BDP-S370, but managed to fix it with "Screen format" parameter in its Screen setup. The "Fixed Aspect Ratio" works fine, while when set to value misleadingly named "Original" it does like you said.