Changing the Aspect Ratio of Xvid

[Lemur]

Ugh. So I get my hands on some out-of-print BBC shows for the wife. So we pop them in the Divx-compatible DVD player. So the aspect ratio is all messed up — should be 16x9, but it's somehow squeezed into a 4x3 ratio, looks all squozen.

So the wife says, "You can fix that, right?" Thus begins a half-hour of searching through the DVD player's menus, seeing if there's any way to adjust aspect ratio. There is not.

Then it's time to hit Google, and Doom9, and every video resource I can find. I wind up using VirtualDub ('cause I likes my open-sauce) and the full Xvid codec (which is also open source). But the two won't play with each other. Thus beings a solid hour's worth of sub-menus and tweaks, trying to find what's causing the show-stopping errors.

The end result? I got it to work, ultimately, by tweaking the "codec friendly multiple" number in a fourth-level buried menu. THEN it worked.

I'm sure her Highness will not appreciate the geek blood I have spilled over this problem.

[KukriKhan]

LOL, ain't it teh truth? If we bask in the glow of the high trust and confidence of "You can fix that, right?", we also gots ta wallow in the misery of unacknowledged spilt geek-blood. :)

p.s. "open sauce" = rofl.

p.p.s. Good work on the persistence in digging through 4th level sub-menu's. I felt your pain.

p.p.p.s. What BBC shows were these, so we know to watch out?

[Lemur]

p.p.p.s. What BBC shows were these, so we know to watch out?

Aristocrats. Mrs. Lemur declared that she wanted more chick flicks around, and this went on my list.

It ain't the first BBC disc to behave badly. I remember we bought the full Sharpe series on DVD, and it looked like someone at the Beeb didn't understand letterboxing or aspect ratios, either. The majority of the discs had forced black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, which made watching them on a 16x9 TV interesting and painful.

[Pannonian]

WinFF
Homepage
An open source media converter. Can convert between most video and audio types. WinFF is the GUI for the underlying FFMpeg utility.

Does this work?

[Lemur]

I'll give it a try for laughs. I'm also going to download the new, shiny 64-bit version of handbrake and see how that shakes out.

-edit-

Hmm, interesting, seems as though my choice of compression might have been the problem all along ...

XviD: HandBrake, these days, is almost entirely about H.264 video, aka MPEG-4 Part 10. This makes it rather...superfluous to include two different encoders for an older codec, MPEG-4 Part 2. When choosing between FFmpeg's and XviD's, it came down to a matter of necessity. We need to include libavcodec (FFmpeg) for a bunch of other parts of its API, like decoding. Meanwhile, XviD's build system causes grief (it's the most common support query we get about compiling, after x264's requirement of yasm). Since we mainly use MPEG-4 Part 2 for testing/debugging, and recommend only H.264 for high quality encodes, Xvid's undisputed quality edge over FFmpeg's encoder is inconsequential, while FFmpeg's speed edge over XviD is important to us.

[naut]

Copying the DVD and converting it to an .AVI might work, and just run it through VLC or something. (May have misinterpreted the problem).

[Lemur]

Copying the DVD and converting it to an .AVI might work, and just run it through VLC or something. (May have misinterpreted the problem).

Sure, if we were watching the DVD on a PC, I could just change the aspect ratio on the fly. But we were trying to watch it in the living room on the sofa, which means a DVD player (that's Xvid-compatible). So what I was trying to do was twofold:

(1) Correct the aspect ratio and (2) compress the video files so that we could watch all six episodes off one disc.