How can I get the full screen space in a video?

Question

I am watching quite often DVDs in VLC on Ubuntu while surfing. As my screen isn't very big, I don't want to waste screen space. But I can't resize the window exactly to the size of the video. Changing the aspect ratio didn't help.

Here is a screenshot to make clear what I mean:

How can I get this screen space?

Solution 1

I had the same problem - it might have to do with the video card acceleration. Go to Tools, Preferences and then Video.

Uncheck the box about accelerated video output, under Display.

Solution 2

By changing the Aspect Ratio. Press the A key when playing the video to change its aspect ratio. You can also right-click -> Video -> Aspect Ratio and then choose the appropriate aspect ratio that suits your needs.

Before: (Notice the gap on the top and bottom)

After: (Notice that the black space is now filled with the video)

Comments

[sv_jan5]

Answer here: askubuntu.com/questions/25745/…

[Martin Thoma]

I tried this already. When I changed the aspect ratio to something different thant 16:9 / 16:10 it looked awful and I had the gap with both of them. Before I called it "video resoution" as I didn't know the english word for "Aspect Ratio". I gave you +1 for the detailled answer, but sadly it didn't help me.

[Nitin Venkatesh]

Try playing around with the Crop ratio (two options below aspect ratio) and see if that's something you are looking for with and without the scale option ticked (one option above the aspect ratio) Thanks for the +1 btw :)

[Andrew D. King]

Worked for me in 14.04 with VLC 2.2.1. My video was stuck at 1x size and appeared "on top of" everything else on the desktop.