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Poster: akb Date: Aug 15, 2006 1:30pm
Forum: movies Subject: Re: Downloaded MPEG-2s are stretched vertically...

It sounds like you are encountering movies that are encoded at 352x480. This is a legal DVD resolution, hardware DVD players are supposed to "double" in the horizontal to make it display correctly. Most (though not all) software players do this correctly as well when encountering movies encoded like this.

What software are you using to view these movies? The Archive recommended viewer is VLC which you can download from videolan.org.

If you give the url of a movie that you are experiencing this problem with it would be possible to verify if my guess is accurate.

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Poster: Spaced Date: Aug 15, 2006 2:00pm
Forum: movies Subject: Re: Downloaded MPEG-2s are stretched vertically...

ArcSoft ShowBiz, the DVD burner software that with my HP, worked great on these size movies, and the discs played great in my old finicky DVD set top player. ShowBiz was much faster than converting them in Premiere then reauthoring in Encore.
This post was modified by Spaced on 2006-08-15 21:00:23

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Poster: Andy Sly Date: Aug 15, 2006 2:17pm
Forum: movies Subject: Re: Downloaded MPEG-2s are stretched vertically...

I was playing them with Windows Media Player. I tried to use a few conversion programs like DVD2AVI, but they inexplicably showed up stretched in those, too, so I just sort-of gave up for the moment.

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Poster: Gryphon Date: Aug 31, 2006 3:56am
Forum: movies Subject: Re: Downloaded MPEG-2s are stretched vertically...

There is a fix you can do to Windows Media Player 10 to get the stretched videos to play at correct width-to-height:

Pull down the Tools, menu and click on Options...

The Options window pops up. Click the Devices tab and wait for the device list to load. Click once on Display, then click the Properties button.

You should now see the Display Properties window and on it a box labeled "Pixel aspect ratio"

Most of the stretched video is at the new 'widescreen' ratio of 16-to-9 (16:9). The Aspect Ratio for that is 0.5625 (which is 9 divided by 16), so set the "horizontal pixels per vertical pixel" to 0.562.

The video should now play correctly.

NOTE: You will have to reset "horizontal pixels per vertical pixel" back to 1.0 to watch your other videos, or they will look too wide!

Apparently, 'aspect ratio' is not stored in the video format, or Win Media Player doesn't read it correctly.

- Would someone on the archive.org staff care to weigh in on this issue?