This one is really weird. I don't normally play back wmv files, but am forced to (unless I re-encode I guess losing quality).

All mkv/avi/whatever always plays back in the correct aspect ratio with the mplayer command line I have, but for some reason, 16:9 WMV files which are verified to be correct on windows play back unfortunately play back squashed 4:3.

Again, this only happens on WMV files, all AVI/Matroska etc aspect ratios are always correct for the last 2 years.

Where can I find settings to play with this without messing up my my other codecs?

Regards,
Ramrunner

If all your WMV files play this way you might just force the
setting for video wmv files to a different aspect ratio.

Setup -> Media Settings -> Videos Settings -> File Types

I don't have a setting for wmv on my 5.5 system so it looks
like you will have to add one. Copy a working one that uses
xine or mplayer-resumer.pl and search man for how to tweak
the aspect ratio for the player that you choose.

FYI: I had a similar problem with some mkv files and fiddled
with this for hours. Though the aspect ratio was displayed
correctly, I couldn't get it to play full screen, there was a
black band top-bottom as well as left-right. I finally figured
out that the video file actually had black padding bands on
the sides so it was playing full screen all along. I found this
out by playing it in a windowed player and noticed that there
were bands on the sides that I couldn't get rid of by resizing.

Thanks mate, I didn't realise I could set the playback options on a per-file type basis. When I posed the question, I just remembered the generic mplayer options line I've edited a few times (for 16:9, AC3 etc).

Annoying though! Like I said any other file type plays fine - just WMV is wrong even though they play back fine on Windows.

I should be able to fiddle my way around this. Thanks again.

Ed.