[whatwg] video tag: pixel aspect ratio

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Mon, 2008-12-01 at 23:07 +0100, Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> > Given the number of people who watch 4:3 video stretched to a 16:9 
> > display without even noticing/caring that the aspect ratio is wrong,
> 
> While I'm aware that there are such people, largely because they don't 
> know how to configure their TV's properly or because their TV's are 
> broken by design, there are many others who do notice the difference 
> (including myself).  From my experience, stretching a 4:3 picture to 
> fill a 16:9 screen is enough to make people on the screen look weird and 
> out of proportion.  It's less noticeable with cartoons, but in general, 
> it's very noticeable and annoying.  We should inflict such annoyances 
> upon end users if it avoidable; at least not by default.

The point wasn't that it is OK for UA:s to distort video because there
are people who don't notice, but that some people do/will encode video
with the wrong aspect ratio without noticing/caring. The general
consensus seems to be that this isn't worth the effort fixing.

But in any event, if a CSS solution is in fact possible that would be
much better than any video-specific solution. I don't think CSS
transforms can do it though, unless someone can give an example?

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Opera Software