Cover view sameness

[sitenoise]

I think I've been hinting at this for a while with the iPhoto integration and such.

I've spent (wasted?) a lot of time making a bunch of cover art the same ratio so that it looks gorgeous in cover view ... most of the time. I can't figure it out, but sometimes it just doesn't. There will be an oddball or two that doesn't line up right. I haven't made sure that all of the art is the same size. I've even tried different ratios 3x4, 4x6, and 5x7 ... which seems to look best.

Is there a ratio that you use in the code? Or better yet, can you ... in code ... force a ratio/relative size, so that all the covers look the same? I'm really enamored of the Events View in iPhoto and would love that sameness to happen in my cover view.

[Conor]

It used to be that the ratio was fixed for the DVDs, making them all line up; but users with posters instead of covers would have slightly distorted images (this is especially true of old movies "Casablanca"). Now with HD-DVD and Blu-ray there are even more ratio possibilities so we removed the strict ratio. I am trying to get both options in the new version. Like the main cover view on the bottom left I have modified it so that it allows for a 8% distortion in favor of all the covers lining up. I will keep testing as 8% might be too much for those with posters, but try out the beta and let me know.

[sitenoise]

I'll have to investigate further because I think I may be influencing the outcome by having already resized or clipped my posters. btw - I use posters almost exclusively, not dvd covers from amazon.

What I'm seeing is almost the same thing I had when trying to do this manually: The Vertical size shows a lot more sameness than the Horizontal size.

I assume this is only for the cover view representation and doesn't actually change the size of anything, so I'd be for a much more liberal tolerance in order to get the horizontals lining up. Is it 8% of the original size or 8% of the cover view size? (And to make sure we're talking about the same thing, I'm talking cover view and NOT cover flow.)

The reason I ask is that there is a difference between 8% of a standard Amazon 350 x 500 (after lop off the white) and a typical Poster from http://www.impawards.com or http://carteles.metropoliglobal.com/ which is usually where I get mine. Or google image surfing.

Bottom line for me is that my cover view images while viewing in that mode, typically, are about 100 x 200 and so more distortion would be welcome and probably not very noticeable. And I'm not using that mode to admire the posters anyway, when I want to do that I use Cover Flow or Full Screen.

[Conor]

It's 8% of the ratio of the image. The cover view cell is 1.4 ratio wise, if an image is between 1.35 or 1.45 then it fills the entire cell. Otherwise it's drawn to ratio and centered horizontally or vertically as necessary. Do email me a screenshots, as when speaking about layout it's easier to understand what you are referring to.

[sitenoise]

I don't think I understand what you just said. Probably doesn't matter. Emailing a screenshot.

[UPDATE]
I just noticed that it seems you are taking care of this while in full screen cover view. The widths (horizontal sameness, if you will) appear to be the same.