2.35 aspect ratio and flickering vertical lines

[mach]

Ok, I hope this post isn't as stupid as most people's first posts are. Anyway, I'm having some problems in my quest to sucessfully convert the vob files of oceans eleven I have to mpeg4 with the xvid codec.

The first problem is the aspect ratio. I looked on amazon.com and it said that the aspect ration was 2.35. However, on doom9's article about aspect ratios, it doesn't mention the 2.35 aspect ratio. When I preview it, the image is stretched vertically (or squashed horizontally, whatever you like). There are also black bars above and below the picture, which I would like to remove when I convert it (I heard that the line between the picture and the black bars takes some space to keep crisp), also it just looks better with out the bars.

The second problem is that there are flickering horizontal lines across anything that moves, which gets very annoying.

The last problem is that when I try to open the avs file in vdubmod I get this error:

Avisynth open failure:
Plugin C:\...\mpeg2dec.dll is not an AviSynth 2.5 plugin.
(C:\...\vts_01.avs, line 7)

edit: changed subject to something more appropriate

[jggimi]

There are aspect ratios, and then there are aspect ratios. The confusion comes from figuring out which aspect ratio is which. DVDs have fixed resolutions -- 720x576 PAL, 720x480 NTSC. These resolutions, when viewed with square pixels (like on a PC) are 1.25:1 or 1.5:1. But a DVD's Display Aspect Ratios (DAR) will either be 4:3 (1.33:1) or 16:9 (1.85:1), through resizing on playback.

At the same time, there are many different aspect ratios for film. So DVDs that are of films with aspect ratios other than 4:3 or 16:9 will always have letterboxing encoded into the video stream. The DAR chosen by the production company is usually, but not always, chosen for the minimum letterboxing. It does happen that "widescreen" movies are sometimes encoded with 4:3 DARs.

For PC display (such as you are planning to do), one typically crops the letterboxing away, and sets a resolution based upon the DAR of the DVD. If you're using a tool like Gordian Knot, you select either 4:3 or 16:9 as described in the guide -- if you can't tell by looking at the image which is the correct DAR, look at the resulting resolutions you get with square pixels, and pick the one closest to the film's AR, which in this case is 2.35:1.

The flickering horizontal lines are called interlace artifacts. They don't appear on a TV, because TVs are designed for interlaced content. They appear on the PC with video streams that were either shot with video camera (such as concerts, sporting events, newscasts), or were shot on film and then transferred to NTSC video. That process is called Telecining, and if you are using an NTSC DVD that was a film transfer, you will see this unless you remove the Telecining. This is typically done either with "Force FILM" in DVD2AVI, or it is done with a set of Inverse Telecine filters during the encoding process. The choice will depend on the content, and I refer you to www.doom9.org/ivtc-tut.htm for much more information on the subject...including, what to do if you see these lines on PAL transfers.

I can't help you with the VdubMod error, except to recommend reinstalling your encoding packages.

[frodoontop]

For the avisynth error, look at the yv12 faq in the avisynth part of this forum. You got the wrong mpeg2dec, question 2.