1046789 - Implement better handling of different aspect ratios for Desktop UI

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Hello (Loop) :: Client, defect, P3)

Description

[Sevaan Franks [:sevaan]]

Attachment: Example of how video should be resized in portrait and landscape.

This is am implementation bug for the UX work carried out in Bug 1008935.

Comment 1

[Nicolas Perriault (:NiKo`) — needinfo me if you need my attention]

Comment on attachment 8465468 [details]
Example of how video should be resized in portrait and landscape.

As a desktop conversation window can be detached, we need examples for other sizes as well (and probably define which ones we actually plan to support).

Comment 2

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

One of the side-effects of choosing this UX is that videos often end up looking either squished or stretched in one direction.  The mockup currently attached to the bug looks fine, but it's not likely to be a common video call use case.  Faces, on the other hand, tend to look strange and slightly "wrong" if they're scaled in only one dimension.  I'd suggest doing some mocks (or just finding some examples) that contain faces of human faces before settling on this UX.

Adding a needinfo on abr, since he's been in the video-conferencing game long enough that I suspect he's got some experienced-based thoughts & opinions here, and sfranks for his thoughts as well.

Comment 3

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

As a reminder, the other options besides scaling here are:

* letterbox/pillarbox: leave blank horizontal or vertical space to preserve aspect ratio
* crop either the vertical or horizontal edges and scale the video both horizontally and vertically to fill the area while preserving aspect ratio

Last week, abr and I found a neat thing that Vidyo does in at least some circumstances: they crop, and you can use your mouse to drag the image around, treating the box it is displayed in as a viewport.  There's no discoverability affordance in Vidyo's implementation, but one could imagine thinking something up, if we wanted to do something similar.

Comment 4

[Tomasz Kołodziejski [:tomasz]]

I already asked this question and came up with the same natural solution (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1077610#c2). From the user's perspective I'd be most happy to see both of these implemented and have a way to switch between those. Google Hangouts has this option (kinda hidden): just double click the video and it will toggle between these two modes.
I find it, probably, less annoying to fit rather than cover. With cover it's often the case that I won't see part of the person's head (say, 4:3 video showed on 16:9 screen).

Changing aspect-ratio is obviously unacceptable as squeezing 16:9 into 4:3 will look terrible.

And also a side-note: I often find it _very_ annoying that I cannot move/hide self-view in hangouts. Especially on mobile. It takes up some space and when I talk to like 4 people I usually cannot see one of them. Self-view should be draggable (maybe even resizable) and hidable.

Comment 5

[Adam Roach [:abr]]

Messing up the aspect ratio is an absolute nonstarter, but I don't see anyone proposing that. I've come to realize that people have widely differing sensitivities to aspect ratio distortion. Being on the high edge of that curve, I agree strongly with Tomasz' statement that this is unacceptable, even though it may not be obvious to everyone.

What I see in the mock-up is a letter-boxing / pillar-boxing solution. There might some confusion arising from the fact that Sevaan used an image of the ceiling (which has no inherent directionality), and rotated it 90° to show a "taller than wide" video.

I've seen both this approach and the "scale, crop, and fit" solution Dan describes used. I personally prefer what Sevaan has specced out, since the other approach can lead to confusing "well I see it in my self view, but the other person can't see it" kind of situations.

For the self-view, I'll note that we *need* to do letter/pillar-boxing rather than cropping, for privacy reasons.

Comment 6

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

OK, I realize now that I was confused, and that the proposal here really is just normal letter/pillarboxing.
Cleaing the needinfo for sfranks.  Sorry about that!

Comment 7

[:shell escalante]

Was this handled with the aspect:ratio patch you landed?  Just want to know if we should keep open and on our backlog to pull from.

Comment 8

[Mike de Boer [:mikedeboer]]

Yes, this has been fixed quite a while back in bug 1093780.