I have a 770, and used to have a COWON A2 ($340 new), which is a high end PMP with the same size screen as the 770. I am loving the 770, and now watching video on it a lot.
One of the best features on the COWON A2 is you can actually zoom in on a video you are watching, choosing 110%, 120%, 130%, etc. This make's a MUCH better video experience, because you can watch the videos much larger by zooming in. Yes this will crop a little, but often, like in dialog scenes and facial closeups it doesn't matter at all. I would zoom in about 60% of the time, and was usually watching (my own) DVDs ripped to the PMP.

This is a really, really nice feature. Its hard to believe but it makes watching video much better because everything in the screen is larger. So, this is my most needed improvement to my 770. I am assuming no player can do this, but how hard would it be to add this to MPlayer or another player?
Any ideas?

Is there another place to put a request like this? somewhere on maemo?

You can call mplayer from command prompt to make such a zoom effect.

i do not think you will ever see an arbitrary zoom. the only zooming the device supports is pixel doubling. i would imagine any software zoom other than those would run too slow to be watchable. your old cowon likely had more versatile video scaler which would make sense being thats all it did.

with these ITs you have to do all scaling up front on pcs to encode/transcode your videos to (probably) 400x240

EDIT : I defer to kontorri if he thinks otherwise - although i would suspect this would not be fun
EDIT : I defer to serge too especially
EDIT : I defer to Linus Torvalds

I suppose its feasable if the video plays smoothly without any extra zooming/cropping and i see your vid player has same resolution so you probably already encoded to 400x240 or lower? Still-- sounds like a command line option, not dynamic adjustment?

MPlayer does not have any serious image scaling restrictions (N800 supports arbitrary scaling in hardware, N770 uses a very fast software scaler).

In order to get this zooming effect, you can read about '-vf crop' mplayer command line option.

Yeah, basically it could probably be done even on the fly, but why really do that. If you have black borders of stuff like that, then the crop option definitely makes sense, but launch time should be just as good as runtime cropping.

Thank you. It would be great to do this on mplayer.
I will test Mplayer with my videos to try to zoom.

Would I use '-vf crop' and not –vf scale? I can’t quite figure out the list of mplayer options (which has –zoom also). I read it several times, but not sure which is best.
I will try with crop, but please tell me if there is a better command. Ty.