VirtualDub and widescreen

[steveryan]

Whenever I load a VOB file into VirtualDub the avi comes out as fullscreen, i've looked everywhere in VirtualDub to find the answer to this problem but to no avail. I've not seen anybody else have this problem so it's probably something simple that i've missed, anybody help? TIA.

[bugster]

AFAIK, the avi format, whatever codec happenes to be used, does not support the concept of the DAR (Display Aspect Ratio) that mpeg uses. What you have to remember is that PC displays use square pixels, TV's do not. So when you create an avi of (say) 720*576, that is exactly how it will be displayed, whereas an mpeg of that resolution (with a few other restrictions for the DVD format) could be 4:3 or 16:9. Decent PC playback software (Such as PowerDVD/WinDVD) will read the DAR in an mpeg and scale the image appropriatley, as will a DVD player/TV.

Hope this helps

[steveryan]

Thanks for the reply, appreciate it. I decided to try Xmpeg and that lets me convert into Divx/Xvid and keeps the aspect ratio, i'm getting very confused now