About Resolution and 4:3

[Error]

So i am trying to rip a 720x480 dvd and encode it in x264. My goal is to leave the resolution unresized & cropped. The problem is that I noticed that playing my 720x480 .avs file on my pc it does not fill the entire screen.

If I play the actual DVD on my PC there are no black bars and the movie fills the entire screen. So I did some looking and media player classic is reporting the DVD is 720x540, yet GSpot and DGIndex are reporting the size as the standard 720x480. Is mpc resizing the video to fit or am I missing something?

I would like to keep the resolution untouched during encoding and would like to know where this 720x540 is coming from and why my 720x480 .avs file with no crop or resize is not filling the entire screen.

[blutach]

The aspect ratio may actually be 2.35:1 as many movies are these days.

The actual resolution will be 720 x 480

Regards

[Error]

But why would the 720x480 not fill the entire screen? And why is media player classic showing it as 720x540? Standard Media Player is reporting the aspect ratio of my 720x480 .avs file is 3:2 instead of 4:3. Where or why is it making this change?

[Susana]

The avs aspect ratio is 1:1 whereas the a.r. in DVD is 4:3 or 16:9, hence the difference.

If you have a 4:3 monitor and the image fills the entire screen, mark the x264 as 4:3 or resize to 640x480 and 1:1.

P.D. 720/480@1:1=3:2=1.5:1>1.33:1 hence black bars appear.

[Error]

mark the x264 as 4:3

Where or how would I mark it as 4:3? I have never seen the option to specify aspect ratio in either megui x264 encoder or .mp4 muxer. I appreciate all the help btw.

[Susana]

I've never compressed to x264 for the moment, but sure anyone else can help you with this.

Edit: maybe mp4 only supports a.r. 1:1 as avi does, but I don't know.

[Error]

You are probably right. i just went with 640x480 at 1.33AR

[Borbus]

720x480 isn't 1.33, its 1.5. DVDs are anamorphic. You can either resize it to 1.33 like you did, or adjust the aspect ratio in your container. I think that's what Susana meant. I use Matroska and in mkvMerge GUI you can set either the DAR (4/3) or the actual display size (720x540).

Hope it makes sense. Here's some useful links if it doesn't:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anamorphic
http://gregl.net/videophile/anamorphic.htm

edit: I should add that adjusting the aspect ratio in the container is the best way to do it since it's the only way to retain full DVD resolution. You actually lost 80px of horizontal resolution by resizing. If you had a 16:9 DVD you would lose quite a bit of vertical resolution by resizing.