Help with fixing wrong AR of an original dvd

[Talayero]

Hi,
I bought a movie that originally had 2.35:1 aspect ratio. They had cropped it to 1.80 more or less. Most of the reviews I’ve read about the dvd complain about the cropping but say nothing about the images being a bit distorted, out of shape.

I would like very much to resize the film in order to get a dvd with a better aspect ratio. I tried it but I keep seeing the images too long.

Really, I don’t know if it’s possible to fix that. All I know when I see the picture is that in order to see it well I should reduce the height, keeping the same width.

I tried some script like this one (by the way, the movie is ntsc):
DirectShowSource("O:\saragosa manuscript.m2v")
LanczosResize(720,372)
AddBorders(0,54,0,54)

But nothing changed. All the figures are still long

This is one of the reviews: http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film/DVDReviews11/Saragossa_Manuscript.htm
(they say the actual dvd AR is 1.92:1, but I would say 1.80:1 at most)

Thanks in advance.

[miztadux]

It's weird that nothing changed after resizing + adding borders...did you look at your avs directly in a media player or after encoding it to dvd ? Because dvd pixels aren't square and it's normal that the source video looks out of ratio.

As for your source dvd:

Perhaps the video is improperly flagged as 4:3 instead of 16:9 ?

I say that because a ~1.8 = 16:9 image encoded as 16:9 material takes up the whole frame (720x480) and is "flattened" to 16:9 by the player.
If this video is flagged as 4:3, the player will scale it as such and, as you say, figures will be long

Anyway you shouldn't have to add borders to get a 16:9 image on a dvd, just encode the full frame as 16:9....(unless you really want to get letterboxed 4:3 material but i doubt that's the case...)