Widescreen MPEG2 cropped to 4:3 in WMP 11 and Vista Media Center

[daemonic3]

I've spent over a week on this now, and only gathering more data, but seemingly not making any progress. I posted this in another forum (http://thegreenbutton.com/forums/thread/245680.aspx) but it seems to have gone nowhere, so I'm trying a new audience. I feel like I can't be alone on this issue!

Basically, I have a full library of home videos from my camcorder that I have verified to be MPEG2, with 720x480 pixels, and the aspect tag is 16:9. This was verified using DVD Patcher, MPEG Validator, and G-Spot. Also, I have multiple PC's and every one that plays it correctly, media player says the info correctly. But on my Vista machine, it reports the aspect (using "properties" in media player) as 853x480, and aspect "unknown". It uses the Cyberlink SP Decoder.

The result, in both Media Player 11, and Vista Media Center, is that the sides are cropped - meaning valid video is cut from the image, and not displayed on my widescreen TV. Rather, there are black bars on the sides. To make matters worse, the image is not "squashed" where all pixels are there, just compressed to 4:3, but the sides are physically lost. So the people in the image don't appear fat, they are 1:1 how they were filmed. This causes LOTS of confusion when trying to google for this problem because most hits I come up with are simple fixes with aspects in players and encoders, etc.

Here is a link to a small (only 2 second) clip, from an accidental recording while on vacation. http://home.comcast.net/~daemonic3/video/MOV_20070531_080008.MPG

I'm begging people to download and try it if 1) you have Vista and media player 11, 2) you have a widescreen monitor/TV. In media player, from the playlist, right click and select "properties" and tell me:

1) what stats does it give for dimensions and aspect
2) what audio and video codec it says it is using.

I don't believe this to be a codec issue, but I'm trying to isolate it to a valid SW issue. I can use Media Player Classic and it properly fills the screen with no cropping, and reports the file stats correctly. But of course I want to use Media Center because that is why I bought the PC!!!

Thanks in advance! Looking forward to any replies....

[aedipuss]

sounds like something is set to pan&scan in the options. can't help with specifics as i don't have it.