Aspect Ratio Problem

[thevideofan]

First, let me start by saying thanks to the authors of DVD Decrypter and DVD Shrink for their awesome tools.

I have been backing up DVD's for a relatively short period of time, and each problem I have run into has been answered by previous posts on these forums, so I also thank those that moderate and contribute.

My current problem, though, has me befuddled. I did a search, but the answers that I found were all fairly technical and I guess a bit out of my range.

I use Decrypter (3.5.2.0) to rip and burn and DVD Shrink (3.2.0.15) to reauthor. I normally just back up the main movie or use VOBBlanker to keep the menus and the main movie but remove extras.

Recently, I backed up two movies which play fine on a standard 4:3 television. Both movies are widescreen. On this TV they play with bars at top and bottom. But when I play on a widescreen tv, I get black bars on all four sides. The dvd player is recognizing the movie in 4:3 and setting the display to accomadate that. When I switch the display to 16:9, the picture is stretched to fit. The widescreen unit is a portable player, so the options are fairly limited. I would the movie to play full widescreen on the portable and letterbox on the other tv. What can I do to fix this?

Sorry for the length, but I wanted to make sure everyone had as much info as possible.

Thanks for your help.

[TheSeeker]

Would this be a case of the movie being 4:3 letterboxed to look widescreen? In which case you can use the avs advanced option in dvd rb 4:3 letterbox => 16:9, to convert it to true widescreen.

EDIT: Be careful though im pretty sure this does cut out some of the viewable picture.

[mpucoder]

For most players all you have to do is tell it what kind of display is connected, through a setup menu.

It sounds like the player is set to "4:3 letterboxed", in which case the player shrinks the picture to fit a 4:3 display and does not signal the display to go into widescreen mode.
If it were set to 16:9 the player would not resize the picture, and would assert the WSS (WideScreen Signal) to tell the display that the image is widescreen.

[TheSeeker]

Originally posted by mpucoder
For most players all you have to do is tell it what kind of display is connected, through a setup menu.

It sounds like the player is set to "4:3 letterboxed", in which case the player shrinks the picture to fit a 4:3 display and does not signal the display to go into widescreen mode.
If it were set to 16:9 the player would not resize the picture, and would assert the WSS (WideScreen Signal) to tell the display that the image is widescreen.

Thats what I thought at first too.. But it sounded like he tried to set the dvd player to output to widescreen, but that didnt work. Also if the movie is 4:3 letterboxed it would look widescreen to most people on a 4:3 display but if you set the dvd player to output to 16:9 display it WOULD have to stretch it to fit though, as it is not true widescreen.

[thevideofan]

The movie states that it is "widescreen (1.66:1)" on the case. I don't know if that helps.

Thanks for quick response.

[mpucoder]

In that case the only way to tell is to look at the ifo file. You can use IfoEdit to check it - start it up, open the ifo for the main movie, and look at the summary (for the movie, not the menu) It will say "(16:9) (leterrboxed)" if it is widescreen, or "(4:3) (not specified...)" otherwise.

[thevideofan]

IfoEdit says 4:3 unspecified. I also realized that the two discs that I had this problem with were released straight to video. (Lion King 2/Little Mermaid 2). So maybe they were not originally made to be true widescreen.

Make sense?

[TheSeeker]

I would say almost for certain that your movie is 4:3 letterboxed (Or the video stream has been incorrectly flagged which is possible but not probable). You can modify it to widescreen with a little work using dvd-rebuilder. But that might be out of the scope for this particular forum.