Aspect Ratio (DivX and XviD) and stand alone players - HELP!

[drfresh]

I've just got an Akai DV-PX7000. Well it plays every format DivX or XviD I've tried so far.

But aspect ratio is wrong. Now I live in Europe in the region where PAL is the TV format.

It seems to me that the simple problem is that avi's are encoded for viewing on a PC screen, where the aspect ratio of the pixels are 1:1. But on a PAL TV the ratio is 54:59, that is every pixel is a bit weider than it is heigher. If the player doen't compensate for that, the picture looks stretched. And that's excatly what happens.

Does anybody know if this i a common problem or if it can be solved?

Dr. Fresh

[junkmalle]

That's part of the problem. But I think that small difference would hardly be noticable. The biggest issue is that there's no set standard for pixel aspect ratio in Divx/Xvid/Mpeg4 files. People do all kinds of crazy things.

My DVD player (Liteon LVD-2002) has separate zoom for the width and height so I can adjust the picture if the player picks the wrong aspect ratio. Most of the Divx players don't seem to support this though.

[drfresh]

Well that would certanly be a very good option to have. I can tell you that the 1:1 versus 54:59 difference indeed is notisable! I had the same problem when I used to convert to SVCD. I wasn't aware of the 54:59 ratio, and I allways thought that something were wrong with my files. But after I learned to compensate for that it all looked fine.

But as I have no stretching option on my player I'm not very happy with DivX/XviD playback anymore

Dr. Fresh