Have you ever tried to watch a 4:3 TV Signal on a widescreen TV? It looks like crap right? Not anymore! Would you like to know how to make it look a LOT better? Get the Inside Scoop on the next generation of Intelligent Frame Correction (IFC), Version 2, developed by Marvman one of our Team MediaPortal developers. Then, never look back!

For more information on IFC, be sure to read the  IFC Wiki Manual, or contact Marvman with questions in the IFC Forum.

Marvman's Profile

Download IFC V2


IFC works for all TV and video content including recorded TV, DVDs, even online videos.

IFC V2: Beast Unleashed

1. What inspired you to create the Intelligent Frame Correction (IFC) plugin?

In Germany, some broadcasters still provide a lot of content in 4:3 resolution, and everyone who has a 16:9 wide screen TV knows it’s a mess to tweak your picture to display an acceptable result. The real content is embedded in black bars of different sizes (the next mess). In my case, my 16:9 TV has a 4:3 resolution (knock knock, mess?). 

As a developer, I said to myself, “get your hands on the keyboard Marvman, and start to hack.”  However, the real inspiration came from my parent’s Philips TV. I saw that it crops black bars too, BUT with a very cool, eye-catching fade effect (I like fading ).

So I started to write the first version, primarily for German broadcast signals. After several versions, and fulfilling a lot of user requests, IFC1 was doomed!  The architecture was simply not prepared for all this stuff.

2. What does IFC do for users?

IFC takes care of all aspect ratio adjustment. The user only has to install the plug-in and voila - it works!  That is the main premise and goal of the plug-in.  I saw other plug-ins where you had to be a developer, or read lots of threads, to understand how those plug-ins work.

To get an idea what IFC does, just compare these screenshots of playback without IFC and with IFC.

Without IFC:

With IFC:

3. What is new in Version 2?

Due to the heavy feature blow out, and quick and dirty implementation, the code was doomed, by me! So, the task for Version 2 was to create a much more user friendly GUI and to configure IFC within MP.  The next big challenge was to support almost all aspect ratios and letterbox combinations.

Here in Germany the broadcasters provide only a few different combinations. I suspected there must be more weird combinations out there. Pretoriano started to help me to test IFC and gave me Italian content to test IFC with.  What should I say? The Italian content showed me I had to create a lot more logic and patterns!

After some time, and more investigation, I met Dread Fury (a web developer) and he offered to help me. Dread and I talked about IFC and discussed it feature by feature.  It was his suggestions, from a user's point of view, that steered IFC to become what it is today. Dread comes from the USA and he provided me with some more odd content, which was very helpful.

Version 2 is a complete rework. The method to find the edges, which is essential for black bar detection, now comes from some of the base code of the old “autocropper” plug-in.  After reviewing the autocropper code, I concluded that using some lines from it would make IFC more flexible.

Unfortunately, the old code had some drawbacks for the cropping behavior.  Each line was cropped exactly.  That’s OK, but it looks ugly for the user and gives a ‘twitchy’ picture. So I created a 'stabilizer'.

Then I added the advanced view modes.  The basic view modes are:  Normal, Stretched, Non-Linear etc.  Now you can also set a zoom factor for each side.  That gives a lot more flexibility to the user.

To control IFC we created the one button control, which is really essential, because the number of buttons on a remote control is limited.

The front-end GUI is also new. This allows users to change some settings directly in MediaPortal. You can access these in MP via Settings > Intelligent Frame Correction.  Skin files for  these settings are provided for the default Blue3/wide skins.

4. Can anyone use IFC or is it only for technically advanced users?

The main goal of IFC was to provide a plug-in that you just install and use, without needing to know how it works. The same as when you buy a TV, switch it on, and enjoy.

The drawback is that the plug-in must work globally and I can’t optimize it for each country. That’s why I created the full customizable configuration to tweak a bit and satisfy the rest of the world

5. Do you have to customize the default settings or will they work in most cases?

In most cases the default settings should work great.  However, if you wish, or need, to customize the settings for your broadcast signal, the configuration has been improved significantly.  There are even balloon tips to help you.

Here is the old 'back-end' configuration screens:



And here is the new 'back-end' configuration screens:



6. What do you mean by the "Beast Unleashed" ?

The name “Beast” came up in a discussion between Bill (Dread Fury) and I.  One day when we were talking once again about IFC, he asked for a new version from the beast! I lol’ed and asked him, WHAT? He told me he calls all his projects “Beast”. So I thought that would be a good tag line for the release of IFC V2.

After six months of developing and testing, “Beast” is the best word to describe it!

7. What are you most pleased about in Version 2? Do you have any plans for more improvements?

For me personally, I am most pleased about the new architecture. As a developer, nothing is worse than ugly, unmaintainable code.

The second point is the support of all common aspect ratios and much better accuracy detecting black bars and grubby edges.

Now that Version 2 has been released, the next step is to fix all bugs reported by the community. New features will be have to be discussed before I implement them in this version.

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So there you have it folks. IFC is a quick, small download and instant configuration; yet it makes a huge improvement to TV viewing.  Great job Marvman!  I would not be surprised if IFC replaces autocropper in MP one day.