SVCD video slightly wrong aspect ratio - questions about it

[Wills]

Hi all

I have 2 SVCD movies that have a problem. The video quality is fine, audio is good and synched, but the aspect ratio is slightly wrong - they are both widescreen, and there are black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, but the picture is slightly stretched horizontally, so the bars are a little smaller than they should be.

So everyone on screen looks a bit weird. It's not extreme, I would estimate that it's 15 to 20 % larger horizontally than it should be.

I can only assume the person who made the mpg had some settings wrong when he/she encoded? I've tried on a PC with Power DVD and it won't play properly there either even after trying to play around with the aspect ratio a little on the software control.

I've tried adjusting the video settings of my DVD player as well - it has three different 'widescreen' (full widescreen, 16x9 etc.) options but none of them work either. Both PowerDVD and my Harmon Kardon DVD25 work fine with all my other 80 svcd movies.

Each movie is 2 CDs and the error is consistent for all four cds. Burned from a cue/bin image with Nero at x16.

How easy would it be to 're-rip' the mpg changing the aspect ratio to the correct size, and how would I go about this? Or any other suggestions to allow me to force the picture to show the correct aspect ratio so everyone doesn't look mildly anorexic?

Many thanks for any replies.



Will

[bunyip]

You can do this by using Avisynth to crop the old bars, resize the widescreen part and add new larger borders, all in one frameserving process, using the 'mpg' or 'dat' file from the CDs and your favourite MPEG2 encoder.

[Wills]

Thanks very much! I will give it a try.

will