pixel aspect

[dvdpunk81]

What are the guidelines for pixel aspect on DVD movies? Do all use 4:3 pixels or do widescreen DVDs use 16:9 pixels?

Right now I'm trying to use Xmpeg to convert Rush Hour 2 to DiVX 4.11 and in the Post Processing tab there's Aspect Ratio and Pixel Size-Pixel Aspect. In Aspect ratio 16/9 has a star by it and in Pixe aspect 4:3(TV) has a star by it. Does this mean that those are actually the correct aspect ratios for the movie?

[LigH]

"Aspect ratio" in Xmpeg means the aspect ratio in the DVD video (MPEG2 video can be flagged to have 1:1, 4:3, 16:9 or 2.35:1 aspects, but for DVD, only 4:3 or 16:9 are used). This setting is useful if you select "Keep aspect ratio" when resizing. If you want to enjoy watching your DivX movies, be sure to use the correct resizing mode - else you will see "egg heads". In most cases, it is useless to look for the aspect ratio on the DVD case; sometimes they are wrong, often they only tell you the aspect ratio of the visible part (e.g. Cinemascope has an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, but the MPEG2 video was encoded with 16:9, therefore you have black bars above and below the movie). Where you see a dot in the combobox, this is the mode which Xmpeg detected by analysing the VOB file. But this does not mean that it is always correct: It is possible to encode an MPEG with the wrong flags by mistake, so everything in this movie is fine - except for the aspect ratio flags.

The "Pixel aspect" in Xmpeg is not so important from my experience - at least I don't know of a way to store the aspect ratio in an AVI file; maybe this setting is useful if you have MPEG output, e.g. by bbMPEG. And I never experienced any change in the behaviour of Xmpeg or of AVI players when transcoding to AVIs with different settings here. If you expect the AVI to be watched on a PC monitor, and you want to be on the safe side, set it to 1:1.

(Does anyone disagree?)