Need Help Keeping Widescreen Borders with 4:3 AR

[Peacefully Disturbed]

I asked this question about a month ago on these forums, but only recently got around to trying to run some of my widescreen DVDs through AutoGK. I am trying to put all of my movies, and TV series DVDs onto my portable media player. For the .avi to work properly on my portable media player it has to be encoded using DivX 5.X, at or below 128kbps VBR MP3 audio, and at either 320x240 or 640x480, and since I plan to play out to a TV alot 640x480 is the only real option.

The problem I'm having is that when I run a widescreen DVD through AutoGK it autocrops the borders out, and if I force a 4:3 AR it of course streches the picture vertically, and since the video has to be 640x480 I need to get around the autocrop. When I asked about this before I was told to set the autocrop threshhold to 0 to have AutoGK leave the borders in the .avi, I tried this when running the Firefly series through which is 16:9, but it still cropped out the borders, and stretched the video vertically to fit. I used the Override Input AR and set it to 4:3, the Detect and force 4:3 if close to that AR, and of course the Tune autocrop parameters with a threshold of 0 settings, but it still came out stretched.

I have a feeling that it might just be the Firefly series, but I'm going to try running some of my widescreen movies through AutoGK tonight, and see if they come out stretched as well. If it is just the Firefly series, would anyone know why its doing this, and maybe have any suggestions of how to get letterbox borders into the video so that I can have it at looking normal 640x480? I will post tomorrow whether some of my other movies keep the borders or not, but if anyone has any suggestions what might be the problem if all of my widescreen movies come out stretched, please don't hesitate to post your ideas.

I am using AutoGK 2.15b, and encoding using the DivX 5.21 codec.

[len0x]

Your problem is that anamorphic 16:9 sources actually don't contain any black bars to start with. So disabling autocrop makes no difference (it only would work for 4:3 letterboxed widescreen ones). AutoGK cannot add black borders on its own.

[CWR03]

It can be done using AVISynth with the Addborders() command, but I've never tried it.

[Peacefully Disturbed]

I looked around online, and in the small amount of english support I found for my portable media player, I found that it actually supports .avi files that are inbetween 320x240, and 640x480, and will add borders for files that don't have an AR of 4:3, despite what the documentation that came with it said. So I tried an episode of Firefly without the forced AR which came out at 640x368, and it worked fine on the player.

Kinda stupid that a bad english version of the manual turned out to be the problem, but thanks for the help anyways.