Problem converting mkv

[mattrigbye]

Hi

I'm kinda new at this, but I have a heap of mkv files which I'm trying to convert so that I can stream them to my xbox. I managed to use ffmpegx in osx to convert it, but it always changes the aspect ratio from widescreen to square (maybe 4:3, not sure exactly). It doesn't seem to make any difference which video codec I choose or what video ratio I choose in the options, it always comes out the same.

Is there something I'm missing?

Thanks for your help in advance,
Matt

[Case]

Is the a.r. wrong in a Mac software player (which?) and/or through the Xbox?
Is your source 16:9 or 2.35:1 or...?

[mattrigbye]

The aspect ratio is wrong in the output file - I have not yet tried streaming it to the xbox.

I'm using ffmpegX. I've tried several different codecs, but they all seem to output the same thing. The source file is widescreen tv - I'm not sure what the aspect ratio is (maybe 16:9?)

I've tried playing with all the settings, but nothing I do seems to make any difference - the final video file is always the same.

Thanks again for your help,
Matt

[Pirx]

I have the same problem. After converting a MKV file (h264, 1280x720) into "MPEG4[.MOV] (ffmpeg)" i got
a 960x720 video.
What's wrong here?

[mattrigbye]

Anybody?

As I said, I'm new at this, so I might be missing something really obvious, so any help would be appreciated, thanks

/Matt

[Case]

If you get this behavior in QuickTime Player, then do try to verify the frame size in another app, such as MediaInfo Mac, as QuickTime Player can do strange things with the window size on some container formats. Perhaps your file is okay, but QTP reports/displays it wrong.

[Pirx]

@Case
NO, even with other player, like VLC or RealPlayer the same wrong frame size. Any other idea?

Thanks in advance!
Pirx

[Pirx]

maybe, it's because I use ffmpegX in "Demo"-mode? A kind of limitation for non-registered usage?

[tomlee59]

No, the unregistered version doesn't purposely make errors.

Could you post a couple of screenshots of the settings you're using? And/or perhaps a bit of the logfile (click on the blue "i" in the Progress pane)? I know you said that the results come out wrong no matter what AR you choose for the conversion, but in order to debug it, let's start from a known state and run some careful experiments.