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I have an official HDMI adapter for my Note 10.1 and it displays the android desktop perfectly fine, there are side bars but I assume these are due to the resolution of my device not being 1080p. However any circular icons are perfectly circular on the tv so it looks absolutely fine. The issue is that as soon as I play video the aspect ratio is completely screwed! Some films display almost correctly but look a bit stretched vertically, there are never any verticle bars like there are on the device (obviously to display widescreen films) so on the tv the film is displayed full height but not full width..... To make it worse if I use a third party video player like BSPlayer the aspect ratios are even worse! The films are practically playing 4:3.

What is strange is that although on the desktop the output is an exact mirror of the display, when playing video it is a separate output (ie the display on the TV does not match what I see on the device. For instance the overlayed play, pause controls and progress bar never appear on the screen.....

What is going on?

Update

Found something else strange.... If I play a film through google play movies which I have bought from google play the aspect ratio is perfect! However if I play a personal film from my sd card through google play movies it is the same aspect issue as the other apps....

How can it play one film correctly and one completely screwed up? (are they purposefully crippling the video output for personal videos?)

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  • "What is strange is that although on the desktop the output is an exact mirror of the display, when playing video it is a separate output (ie the display on the TV does not match what I see on the device." That's not strange, it's a deliberate feature. Apps can use the Presentation API to decide what to show on the external display.
    – Dan Hulme
    Commented Jul 4, 2014 at 22:25
  • So why does the bundled Samsung video player and Google play movies screw up the aspect ratio then?
    – coolblue2000
    Commented Jul 4, 2014 at 22:28
  • Sounds like a bug. Without seeing your movie file it's hard to guess. It could be something like the movie file has the non-square-pixels field set and the player is not respecting it.
    – Dan Hulme
    Commented Jul 4, 2014 at 22:43

1 Answer 1

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I have fiddled around and found that altering the decode mode from HW to SW or System player in BSPlayer fixes the issue! This also works for MXPlayer too.

This results in the correct video ratio although it is not full width on a 1080p tv (just like my desktop) it is at least not stretched. I still don't get why Google Play Movies can play its native videos full width on my tv.

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