16:9 PAR or DAR

[J-Wo]

Can anyone suggest an MPEG-4 encoder GUI (or similar "one-click" GUI) that supports 16:9 pixel aspect ratio (PAR) or display aspect ratio (DAR)? I've tried AutoGK, avi.NET, meGUI, and each only output in 1:1 square pixels -- that is as far as I know. I know I can run the encoded file through MPEG4Mediator to change the PAR/DAR but when I'm doing a batch encode of, for example, 10 episodes of a TV show, that's a lot of extra hard drive space I need (plus added conversion time).

Right know I'm using the good 'ol standby of VirtualDubMod with either xvid 1.1.2 or Divx 6.7. It works fine but I'm just trying to find alternative programs to use... any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Sagekilla]

Unfortunately, there really isn't an "easy" way to do this. If you're trying to encode NSTC video as anamorphic at 720x480 to stretch to 854x480, you can just add --sar 32:27 to the "extra commandline switches" area and the pixels will be stretched to 854 from 720 on playback.

[Brother John]

Try StaxRip or MeGUI. Both are capabable of handling anamorphic MPEG-4.

[J-Wo]

Unfortunately, there really isn't an "easy" way to do this. If you're trying to encode NSTC video as anamorphic at 720x480 to stretch to 854x480, you can just add --sar 32:27 to the "extra commandline switches" area and the pixels will be stretched to 854 from 720 on playback.

what is the "extra commandline switches" area that you refer to? Is this in the codec settings? Or one of the encoder GUIs?

[Brother John]

It’s an encoder option to set the AR flag in the bitstream. Capable frontends set it automatically when needed.

[shadowchen]

MeGUI are capabable of handling anamorphic MPEG-4.

[patrick_]

Another option would be to set PAR in the container (I tried using mp4box and MPC played it correctly).

[musicman2311]

sorry to jump in on this - slightly different flavor of the topic - is there a tool to manipulate settings such as aspect ratio, pixel size and others for H264 and/or VC1 without re-coding?

I have seen bitstreams where there were 'strange' entries so a tool relying on correct/standard entries would not work - example: spiderman 3

[patrick_]

If you use Matroska, you can specify the reproduccion dimensions, else you'll have to set PAR in the mp4.
Although I guess you can rewrite the stream correcting headers, but I don't know of any tool that can do that.