Widescreen movie won't stay widescreen

[bender88]

I'm using Raptor's DVD to DVD-r guide. I made a backup of Ice Age and it worked perfectly. But now I'm trying to backup Signs and I'm having a problem. The movie is 16:9 but as soon as I rip it and open the VOB file in DVD2AVI and preview it, it's squeezed to 4:3. DVD2AVI detects it as 16:9, but doesn't display it right. Subsequently, TMPGEnc and DVDMaestro also display it wrong. Anybody know why?

[asdf]

in "setting" in tmpgenc, did you set the video arrange method as "full screen(keep aspect ratio)? that should fix it. i could tell you why because i posted a question similar to this but the search is currently disabled.

[bender88]

ASDF,

I will try this. But it seems weird that the aspect ratio was wrong even in DVD2AVI - before I even got to TMPGEnc.

[bender88]

I went back and checked, and yes I used "Full Screen - Keep Aspect Ratio"

[asdf]

ya widescreen movies always seem distorted in dvd2avi for me too but after encoding with keep aspect ratio in tmpgenc it looks fine. well sorry cant help you.

[shardison]

It's an anamorphic wide screen movie. Most all widescreen movies are encoded "squished" in the horizontal to 4:3. A flag in the mpeg2 stream tells your DVD player to "smash" it down on your TV screen to 16:9. Many mpeg viewers ignore the flag. Run DVD player software and that VOB will look 16:9 again. If it weren't anamorphic, the quality and detail of the movie would be less than it could be.

[bender88]

Shardison,

I did play it in a software player. It was still displayed wrong and even when I burned it and played it on the DVD player it was squeezed to 4:3. Any other ideas???