Hyperactive

from a comment:
"when i posted a vid before (in 16:9 format) it got all squashed up into 4:3. posting on uk site keeps it in proper shape. was going to bring this issue up with someone at imc but haven't got round to it yet. having it embedded is a great feature i'd love to use, but if it distorts the aspect, i'm less keen."

https://london.indymedia.org.uk/articles/584

upped priority to high

Ok, it appears that we should be able to automatically detect the aspect ratio of uploaded videos using a ruby gem called mini_exiftool. This will add some dependencies to Hyperactive but seems worth it to me.

apt-get install exiftool

gem install mini_exiftool

gives us a nicely integrated OO Ruby tool which will allow us to figure out a whole pile of info about the uploaded video (and we can also use it to blank Exif data in uploaded photos, as a bonus).

It's pretty simple to use, once it's required:

vid = MiniExiftool.new("foo.mov")

height = vid["imageheight"]

width = vid["imagewidth"]

We divide width/height to get the aspect ratio and use 4:3 as a fallback for anything really weird, and we're pretty much in business.

Should be fixed by r1183.

The auto-detection screws up way too often due to the fact that some people like to shoot anamorphic 16:9 video (which is a sort of squashed 4:3 video). I've now added a drop-down box so uploaders must choose either 16:9 or 4:3 when they start their video, because I don't think there's any reliable way to tell automatically what the aspect ratio should really be.