Why no stretch otion yet?

[rain]

Why dont you add "fullscreen stretched" in Machine menu that would strech guest OS to full screen? that would remove black borders around fullscreen. Shouldnt be hard to do.

With strech I mean to resize guest as picture, and not change guest resolution. That strech would be guest OS independent.

[frank]

The next major release will contain such a mode.

[rain]

Can't wait that release. And remember to make this work nicely. VMware has strech, but its not nice because it leaves black borders. This is terrible image you get with vmware. just look at those ugly black borders. http://autoit.pri.ee/pildid/borders.png I hope VB has better streching.

Offtopic: Didnt find good place fo this question, so i decided to append it to this post.Does it look only to me so or is VB really slower than vmware? For me it looks like VB operates with harddisks bit slower.

[mpack]

Can't see how you could "make this work nicely". It's bound to blur text etc.

[Sasquatch]

rain, those black borders are probably created to keep the aspect ratio/scale. It would look really ugly to upscale/stretch a square image to a rectangle. Or a 4:3/5:4 image to 16:9/16:10 resolution.

[valkyr]

and what about the opposite scenario ? - the ability to scroll guests that are higher resolution than the host.

[rain]

Sasquatch my host and guest both have 4:3 aspect ratio. So really cant see reason for those borders.

VB could have check box labeled "Ignore aspect ratio" or input for custom rescaling.Extra option for custom scaling would cut all complaints about streching. That option should be easy to do and also useful for many people.

[Sasquatch]

and what about the opposite scenario ? - the ability to scroll guests that are higher resolution than the host.

Don't the scroll bars work that appear when something like that happens?

[valkyr]

Not quite sure how I missed those , but anyway, some sort of virtual desktop-like scrolling (auto scroll) would be nice as well.

And maybe zoom out/in like some mobile internet browsers have, showing the entire screen zoomed out and then a selection box to choose which part to zoom in to.

[Sasquatch]

VB already auto scrolls in a way. I've noticed the screen move when scrollbars were in place. It's a bit of a hit and miss for the cursor location though, as the place where it scrolls is quite small.
Maybe the zoom out is something to add when using the stretch feature, which can be toggled with the same key or something, like "fit guest display to window size".

[mathieudel]

And what about live host resolution switching instead of guest picture stretching ?

[sej7278]

Offtopic: Didnt find good place fo this question, so i decided to append it to this post.Does it look only to me so or is VB really slower than vmware? For me it looks like VB operates with harddisks bit slower.

yes, in my experience anything disk-intensive like compiling a large project or applying a patch cluster in virtualbox is slow as molasses, shared folders makes it even worse, sometimes it even seems to affect other vm's (some people are blaming linux i/o blocking so would be interesting to hear from windows/mac host users).

its a shame as for anything else i do virtualbox is 99% as fast as the host machine natively.

[twistedlincoln]

I'd love to see a feature that just resizes the guest picture to the window size, independent of the guest's resolution. This would allow functional use of OS's that do not support Guest Additions, as a 640x480 or 800x600 window is much more managable on a larger monitor if it could fill the screen, even if everything is huge.

Maybe the zoom out is something to add when using the stretch feature, which can be toggled with the same key or something, like "fit guest display to window size".

I agree with this 100%. I share my VM's over the network, and use them on multiple machines. If I resize the guest window down to fit properly on a smaller montior, the resolution lowers, and the icons on the deskop are rearranged inappropriately to fit. If I could instead just "zoom down" to fit the smaller monitor, I could work on both comptuers without issue.

[Sasquatch]

And what about live host resolution switching instead of guest picture stretching ?

Programs shouldn't touch the Host resolution. Never, ever. It messes up more things than you may think, like desktop icons. If VB would change MY resolution, it would screw up my dual monitor set up, maybe even beyond repair, and it would also screw up my panels with it's applets.
IMO, software that changes the resolution without a very, very good reason (and there really is never a good reason) is pure evil. Though games are an exception, as they seem to do it without affecting the OS in a negative way. Probably due to the 3D they access, as an overlay.

[mathieudel]

Programs shouldn't touch the Host resolution. Never, ever. It messes up more things than you may think, like desktop icons. If VB would change MY resolution, it would screw up my dual monitor set up, maybe even beyond repair, and it would also screw up my panels with it's applets.

I think I quite know and understand a lot of what is happening when directly changing a host's resolution, and I agree with you, it should not be done this way.

Though games are an exception, as they seem to do it without affecting the OS in a negative way. Probably due to the 3D they access, as an overlay.

That's just what I was thinking about, blitting VM's screens using a separate fullscreen context (being 3D or not is just a matter transformation matrix). I think it comes for (nearly) free when using SDL (as does the lightweight version of VB's GUI), and should be trivial (for one that already knows VB's sources) to implement using OpenGL, for example. Am I wrong ?