16:9 dvd reconignized as 4:3

[Ziemas]

In the last week I've had three DVDs that are 16:9 being recognizied as 4:3 with both PowerDVD4 and DVD2AVI. The discs are as follows: Beautiful People region 5, Ring 2 tartan DVD edition - no region, and Million Dollar Hotel region 5. Does anyone else have this problem with these discs? Is it just bad authoring? Thanks.

[manono]

Hi-

So are you saying that these are widescreen movies mistakenly shown as 4:3 in DVD2AVI and PowerDVD? Well, there's no mistake there. It sounds as if you are another candidate for Doom9's article Aspect Ratios Explained (http://www.doom9.org/aspectratios.htm).

Pay special attention to the paragraph about 2/3 of the way down beginning:

There are also DVDs which have a DAR of 4:3 but contain widescreen picture..

[Ziemas]

I understand the principals behind different AR. The strange thing is that even with PowerDVD the picture is stretched to fill the whole screen with these discs, ie Pan and Scan. There are no black bars.

[manono]

Hi-

Well, I don't know about PowerDVD, but I'd be willing to bet that DVD2AVI's right. Easy way to find out though. Make your .d2v, and open it in GKnot, Crop and View it Resized, and then try out 16:9 and 4:3 and see which one looks normal.

[Ziemas]

That's exactly what I did and why I am a bit confused. All the discs were recognized as 4:3, but looked stretched at that res and looked normal at 16:9.

[manono]

Hi-

If that's what you did, then I may have to eat my words (and pay off on my bet). I'd only heard of one example before now of DVD2AVI being wrong. The Tartan Ring 2 isn't bootlegged, but are you sure about the other 2 (which might make authoring errors more likely)? Anyway-as long as you spotted it before encoding, then no harm done. Learn something new every day at Doom9's site.

[Ziemas]

Thanks for the replys. I'm quite sure that the other two are not bootleged. For one they are region encoded, two they are PAL (all the silvers I've seen are NTSC), three the quality is quite normal, and four they have special features included. All of these things I have yet to see together on one pirate disc, although in my part of the world we see much too many of them. DVD from video tape? But I degress...

[mpucoder]

Are you sure they are not 16:9 with automatic P/S? If so, the player should let you choose how it is displayed. Also (on mine, at least, since my card has TV out) I have to choose one of three monitor types (normal, widescreen, or computer monitor) to get the proper display.

[Ziemas]

I'm not sure what auto pan and scan is or how it operates. In PowerDVD I have tried with both keep aspect ratio enabled and disabled. I have seen no other options to change the AR. And it is only with these three titles that I have ever had a problem. Other 16:9 DVDs are fine.

[mpucoder]

While PowerDVD is playing the movie, right click on the screen. A bunch of options will popup, just below "Keep Aspect Ratio" is the "Pan and Scan" options. If the author of the DVD allows automatic pan and scan, you will see options. Set it to "Off"

[grug2k]

It sounds like an authoring glitch to me, because Auto Pan & Scan, well, pans & scans. It doesn't just stretch the image.

[Ziemas]

Pan and Scan is disabled, and fiddling with it changes nothing. Perhaps I just found three bad discs in a row. Quite strange.

[fu2k]

I've seen a bunch of pirate PAL DVDs from Asia, and many of them have authoring errors such as the problem you have described.

[Ziemas]

Thanks for the replys. Has anyone seen region encoded pirate dvds? The region encoding and packaging of these make me think that they are original. Perhaps pirates are trying to pass off pirate discs as original ala M$ Windows.

[fu2k]

I have seen ones with a "region graphic" printed on the DVD, but the disk itself has no region coding actually applied. Also they tend to have "DD 5.1 Sound" printed on the disk but the surrond channels are often completely silent. Not the highest quality.

[Ziemas]

According to DVDGenie they are all encoded to region 5.

And thanks for the great program FU2k!