Roku/dvd rip aspect ratio and zoom

[gnome]

Hello,

I've been backing up my dvd collection to NAS by ripping and encoding them in h264/ac3 with handbrake. When I watch them with the Plex app on Roku, the movies/shows that were originally in 4:3 will play pillarboxed, as expected.

What's weird is that they only play in true 4:3 when the tv (older 720p widescreen) is in Wide zoom mode. In Normal mode, they're squished like there's a second set of pillars.

Weirder still to me is that when I play the actual dvd in the dvd player, it plays it in full widescreen (no pillarboxing) by default.

Am I doing something wrong with the encoding? I've tried every variation of anamorphic settings (including none), but it always has the same result (squished in normal zoom). I've attached a log.

Thanks

[manono]

First, the NTSC Drumline DVD is 16:9 and not 4:3. I'm not sure why your log says it's 4:3. Either you told Handbrake that or the VOBs are 4:3 and the IFOs are 16:9. Doesn't matter, I guess.

Second, I use MakeMKV to turn my DVDs into MKVs and they don't get reencoded and they play through Plex to my Roku box in the correct aspect ratio. You might consider doing that yourself unless one of the goals is to shrink the filesizes considerably.

Third, if all else fails you could always reencode to some 2.35:1 ratio (the film minus the black bars) and forget about reencoding it anamorphically. Do a crop and resize.

What's weird is that they only play in true 4:3 when the tv (older 720p widescreen) is in Wide zoom mode. In Normal mode, they're squished like there's a second set of pillars.

Again, it's not 4:3. No resizing at all is being done and they're playing at 3:2 (720/480=1.5). What you're seeing is how the video is stored on the DVD with people looking tall and skinny and round things looking oval-shaped.

You might cut out 10 seconds or so from the DVD and upload it somewhere so we can check to see if there's anything screwy going on with the encoding. You might also check out the Plex forums to see if this is a common problem and if they recommend always resizing to some 1:1 ratio such as 720x306 or some such.

I don't (and won't) use Handbrake so someone else might have to help with its settings. Maybe there really are ones you can use to get your movies to play in the proper aspect ratio through Plex.

[gnome]

Hmmm interesting. I'm going to give MakeMKV a try and go from there. Thanks!

[hello_hello]

Handbrake's anamorphic options set the aspect ratio when encoding, but the player may ignore it (I don't know anything about Plex). manono is probably correct about the DVD in question being 16:9, but that aside....

Handbrake's anamorphic "none" resizes to square pixels, so if an anamorphic "none" encode isn't displaying correctly, you either managed to resize the video incorrectly (Handbrake should automatically resize to the correct aspect ratio), or there's something wrong with your playback setup. For example if a widescreen TV is in 4:3 mode it normally takes the 720x480 picture and squishes it down to 4:3 (adding pillarboxing), but if the player is doing the squishing and pillarboxing before it sends the picture to the TV, you may end up with two lots of pillerboxing. It sounds like when you put the TV in widescreen mode, you're correcting that. In "normal mode" does the older widescreen TV expect a 4:3 picture?

I have my Bluray player set to always output 1080p so it does the pillarboxing (if required) and upscaling and sends a 16:9 picture to the TV, but if it's a setup problem maybe you need to check the resolution at which the player is connecting to the TV and it's aspect ratio options, if it has any.