Commit c49c42a4 authored by Nicolas George's avatar Nicolas George

doc/faq: explain DAR/SAR preserving.

parent b4917514
......@@ -467,6 +467,40 @@ point acceptable for your tastes. The most common options to do that are
@option{-qscale} and @option{-qmax}, but you should peruse the documentation
of the encoder you chose.
@section I have a stretched video, why does scaling does not fix it?
A lot of video codecs and formats can store the @emph{aspect ratio} of the
video: this is the ratio between the width and the height of either the full
image (DAR, display aspect ratio) or individual pixels (SAR, sample aspect
ratio). For example, EGA screens at resolution 640×350 had 4:3 DAR and 35:48
SAR.
Most still image processing work with square pixels, i.e. 1:1 SAR, but a lot
of video standards, especially from the analogic-numeric transition era, use
non-square pixels.
Most processing filters in FFmpeg handle the aspect ratio to avoid
stretching the image: cropping adjusts the DAR to keep the SAR constant,
scaling adjusts the SAR to keep the DAR constant.
If you want to stretch, or “unstretch”, the image, you need to override the
information with the
@url{http://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg-filters.html#setdar_002c-setsar, @code{setdar or setsar filters}}.
Do not forget to examine carefully the original video to check whether the
stretching comes from the image or from the aspect ratio information.
For example, to fix a badly encoded EGA capture, use the following commands,
either the first one to upscale to square pixels or the second one to set
the correct aspect ratio or the third one to avoid transcoding (may not work
depending on the format / codec / player / phase of the moon):
@example
ffmpeg -i ega_screen.nut -vf scale=640:480,setsar=1 ega_screen_scaled.nut
ffmpeg -i ega_screen.nut -vf setdar=4/3 ega_screen_anamorphic.nut
ffmpeg -i ega_screen.nut -aspect 4/3 -c copy ega_screen_overridden.nut
@end example
@chapter Development
@section Are there examples illustrating how to use the FFmpeg libraries, particularly libavcodec and libavformat?
......
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