DivX in Matroska --> Hardware player?

[Tom Ellard]

I've been hit with a question and I am stumped.
The man has a Matroska video file with a DivX codec for the video, not sure what the audio is. He wants to play it on a set top DVD player with DivX support. He is needing a reasonably simple process...

* I suggested using VirtualDubMod, which results in an AVI. Problem is that the video is anamorphic, and that gets lost in the AVI format. The video plays with the wrong aspect.

* So I thought to remux it into a .divx container. The player might recognise that. But I can't find a way to add the metadata for the aspect ratio - divxmux.exe doesn't seem to offer that as an option when you remux a test AVI.

* DrDivX will load up a MKV and resize it but it causes a generation loss.

Looking at the RIFF that DrDivX creates for a test file I can see that aspect ratio gets added. Apart from some fancy stuff with a Hex Editor (which I can't really explain over the phone and is messy) - how can I add an aspect ratio meta tag to the .divx file?

Would be obliged for help, as I can see the advtage of MKV, but not for playback on hardware.

[Tom Ellard]

Ok, nobody had any answers. We'll go back to the original source material and try encoding it directly into a .divx stream. I have to say that it's a bad advertisement for alternative containers like MKV that you can get into so much strife. If you have any such files you'll probably never get to see them on an DVD player.

Oh a tip for anybody else that encounters this situation - looks like River Past Video Cleaner might have some way to preserve aspect in an AVI, but in trying to get tracks out of the Matroska file it lost audio sync. And that's a different topic.

:stupid:

[robU*4]

AVI doesn't support aspect ratio. The problem is not the new container, but the old one.

You might remux your file with VDM or Avi-Mux GUI. And then use a tool to set the aspect ratio in the MPEG4 bitstream (don't remember the name of the tool). It's 'lossless'.

[Jacquers]

MPEG 4 Modifier (http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=MPEG4_Modifier)

[Tom Ellard]

Glad to to hear from you, will try these ideas.

Also noted that Mencoder has:

mencoder input.avi -ovc copy -oac copy -o output.avi -force-avi-aspect 16/9

:thanks: