A quick and easy question about aspect ratios

[DRP]

I suspect I'm doing everything right, but I just wanna confirm one little thing if someone would be nice enough to hold my hand on this for me.

When you rip a DVD (say for the sake of example an NTSC one) and input it into DVD2AVI (now DGIndex), it reports the aspect ratio as 16:9 and the resolution as 720x480. So when you go to do the aspect ratio calculations you multiply 16:9 by 480 and get the true width as being 853, then you go on to treat it the same way you would an AVI file but using the dimensions 853x480 instead of the DVD stored 720x480.

That's fine. I get all that and it's no problem.

What if then the DVD stored aspect ratio isn't 16:9 but 4:3 instead? I have just such a DVD right here. It is NTSC but intended to be played on a 4:3 TV *and* the actual video is a very widescreen 2.35:1 AR as well. So you see there is a LOT of black bars. It is stored in a VERY anamorphic aspect ratio (if that's a correct term).

Doing the same sort of calculation again I get 4:3 x 480 = 640.

The thing is though 640 < 720. Does this make any difference or do I just proceed exactly the same as if the true width > stored width?

When you play the 16:9 video on the PC using MPC or PowerDVD or whatever, the width gets stretched out to 853 pixels. When you do the same with the 4:3 version is it correct to say the width gets squeezed down to 640 pixels wide?

[lordsmurf]

No.

http://www.digitalfaq.com/understandsource.htm

You've got something mixed up.