I’m running CoreELEC on a Odroid N2+ and with the whitelist I’ve finally gotten video below 1080p to play at their native resolution (letting my TV handle the up-conversion). The issue I’ve found however is 480p video (DVD’s and .mkv rips from DVDs) are squished vertically by about 25% or so. It’s fine side to side but everyone looks short and fat!
I’ve looked at different settings (both my LG CX and CoreELEC) but I can’t find anything that makes it play at it’s correct size. Does this have something to do with square vs non-square pixel shape?
If I don’t use the whitelist, CoreELEC up-converts to 1080p and the shape is fine. What I’m trying to avoid is two up-convert processes (CoreELEC from 480p to 1080p then the TV from 1080p to 4K).
If you output native 480p video, the aspect ratio is 4:3. Your TV is doing the upscaling to 4k (16:9).
Usually, there should be a setting in the TV options to define the strategy how to upscale:
By width (keeping AR, will crop video on upper and lower area)
By heigth (keeping AR, will add black bars on left & right)
fullscreen (ignoring AR, will result in compression of video in vertical direction)
I checked the TV settings and still found (what seems to be) incorrect behaviour. As a test, I also tried playing it on my computer monitor (which just passes through what is sent to it) and the video displayed the same distortion. This occurs in all my DVD based 480p videos (either .iso or .mkv).
What I see are in the pictures below (especially note the differences in shape of the stained-glass windows and the round shapes in the upper right of the picture). In both the white list and non-480p whitelist scenarios, the 16:9 and Original TV options appear the same. In both cases, the 4:3 puts black bars on the top and bottom of the picture, but the 480p whitelist still is compressed vertically.
I can’t find any other TV setting that change the picture format. The N2+ is plugged directly in to the TV and does not go through a AVR.
