Changing the resolution of a video

[Spring Rubber]

When I was recording something off the TV onto a DVD+RW, I accidentally did it with my satellite receiver's pillar boxing on. I normally run the DVD through DVD Shrink to produce short VOB clips and then use AutoGK to convert them to Xvid for storage on my computer. The result of doing this with pillar boxing on produces a 4:3 video squeezed horizontally with the pillar boxes. What I need to do is stretch the video out to 16:9 so that I have the normal 4:3 video in the middle and the pillar boxes outside of them to fill what's left, just as it appears on a 16:9 TV. As long as that's possible using freeware, I'm ok.

[redwudz]

Since you are going to convert to Xvid anyway, you might use the freeware VirtualDub Mod. No matter what you use, you will have to re-encode, so you might as well just do it once and convert it to Xvid in the process.

If you open it in VDM, go to 'Video>Filters>Add'. If you just need to crop the image, you can use 'null transform' and the cropping feature will be available. If you need to resize, then there is a filter for that. I would suggest trying a short representative clip and experimenting a little, then encoding to Xvid and see how it looks. There are quite a few options available for resizing. You may have to crop out the 'pillars' first, then resize back to the proper aspect ratio/framesize.