video clip squished/squeezed from the sides

[shaema]

Dear all

I have got this flv video clip which played with VLC and WMPC but it looked squished or squeezed from the sides and the characters appeared tall [I think originally it was a wide format probably 16/9 which somehow got saved as 4/3 but without any black bars].

When I force VLC to change from 4/3 view to 16/9 view it looked perfect.

MediaInfo reports:
General
Complete name : C:\Users\Documents\clips\13.flv
Format : Flash Video
File size : 320 MiB
Duration : 24mn 47s
Overall bit rate : 1 804 Kbps
Tagging application : Moyea FLV Lib

Video
Format : H.263
Duration : 24mn 47s
Bit rate : 1 667 Kbps
Width : 640 pixels
Height : 480 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
Frame rate mode : Constant
Frame rate : 30.000 fps
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.181
Stream size : 296 MiB (92%)

Audio
Format : MPEG Audio
Format version : Version 1
Format profile : Layer 3
Mode : Joint stereo
Mode extension : MS Stereo
Duration : 24mn 47s
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 128 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 44.1 KHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 22.7 MiB (7%)
Writing library : LAME3.96.1

Now is there any way to fix it so it can be played without having to force VLC or other media players to change from 4/3 to 16/9 please?

I would like to get it fixed without re encoding if possible. If re encoding is a must then I greatly appreciate any advice about the best output format which preserves the quality with similar file size. The clip would be destined for archiving in my pc.

Thanks all for help and support.

[jagabo]

I don't think h.263 supports non-square pixels. I would try remuxing the video into a container that supports aspect ratio flags -- like MKV. Use FlvExtract to demux the streams, MMG to remux into MKV.

[shaema]

Thanks Jagabo for your prompt reply.

I have just extracted the relevant avi and audio, but, excuse my ignorance, what is MMG? I hope it is a freeware.

Regards

[jagabo]

what is MMG?

Click on the link. MMG is MkvMerge (the muxer), part of MkvTooxnix.

[shaema]

Well done jagabo!

I have managed to use MMG and produced a proper 16/9 clip which played smoothly in VLC.

Many thanks again.