mp4 width/height problem

[jfish666]

i'm trying to convert a vob to mp4, with a width of 720 and a height of 348, but after the video is done, the file is 348 x 348. any ideas?

Encoding started on Thu May  7 06:15:33 PDT 2009
FFmpeg version CVS, Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Fabrice Bellard
Mac OSX universal build for ffmpegX
  libavutil version: 49.0.0
  libavcodec version: 51.9.0
  libavformat version: 50.4.0
Input #0, mpeg, from '/Users/jfish/Movies/Incoming/RAY Title 1/VIDEO_TS/RAY Title 1.VOB':
  Duration: 02:32:25.4, start: 0.280633, bitrate: 6346 kb/s
  Stream #0.0[0x1e0], 29.97 fps(r): Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720x480, 9800 kb/s
  Stream #0.1[0x80]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5:1, 448 kb/s
  Stream #0.2[0x81]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, 5:1, 384 kb/s
  Stream #0.3[0x82]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, 192 kb/s
Output #0, mp4, to '/Users/jfish/Movies/Incoming/RAY Title 1/VIDEO_TS/RAY Title 1.VOB.ff.avi.mp4':
  Stream #0.0, 23.98 fps(c): Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 720x384, q=2-15, 4900 kb/s
  Stream #0.1: Audio: aac, 48000 Hz, stereo, 128 kb/s
Stream mapping:
  Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
  Stream #0.1 -> #0.1
video:3153386kB audio:142763kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 0.153788%
bench: utime=3104.277s
Encoding completed on Thu May  7 07:02:30 PDT 2009

[Case]

It seems that ffmpegX needs a fix when it comes to encoding to MP4 mpeg-4 (ffmpeg) with an aspect ratio other than 4:3 or 16:9. Anything that is not 4:3 or 16:9 gets a an instruction to display the video at 4:3, regardless of the native video resolution (720x384) of the output file.
I am surprised you managed to get 384x384, as I get 4:3 consistently when I try something similar.

A low level solution is to remove the "-aspect" option (or change its value to 1.875) from the command line that ffmpegX uses.

A GUI solution is to not crop (and keep the letterbox bars) and encode to 16:9 (720x400).