DVDx Aspect Ratio

[frankmaster100]

I'm using DVDx 2.0, to convert a few DVD's to Divx avi files, and I'm having a slight problem with widescreen videos. If I put the settings on widescreen, it squishes the video on the sides, making everything tall and skinny. Any other settings I do stretches the video making all the people short and fat. Is there a way to figure out what my settings should be depending on the aspect ratio of the specific DVD I'm working with. Just for an example, I'm trying to convert "Just Like Heaven", and it's 1.85:1 ratio. Here are some screenshots of the settings I'm using currently:

The input screen:


Here's a screen shot of the output settings I'm currently using:


Here's the same screen shot with the list of vew options pulled down"


And here's just a random error I get. Doesn't really hamper production, but I don't know what it means.


One last thing. For some reason, if I just encode a portion of the movie, it will play just fine. But any time I try to encode the whole movie, the file is not playable in WMP and I can't open it in any of my editing software. Just curious. Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks.

[guns1inger]

You should choose 16:9, although I'm not convinced that this will do it properly. When it encodes it should not only resize correctly, but also put a flag in to indicate that the video is 16:9. If your image is coming out tall and skinny then the resize is probably working (that is how the frame looks), but if the flag isn't set properly, playback software won't know to adjust for widescreen.

WMP is probably the worst playback application for testing DVDs. Use PowerDVD or WinDVD if you have them.

All in all, it sounds like this is another dubious one-click-wonder that tries to do many things, but does none of them correctly.

[frankmaster100]

You're right about that, it is kind of a cheap one-trick wonder that may not always do things correctly. However, on the movies that don't have the widescreen problem, it encodes the whole dvd to AVI quite nicely, and looks very nice, almost original DVD quality. And I wasn't using WMP to test a DVD, just the avi file.
Thanks for your reply.

[guns1inger]

Apologies for not reading your post correctly first time round. It certainly does not seem to be able to do what you want. What it should be doing is cropping all the black bars off, resizing for a 1:1 pixel aspect ratio, then encoding. I don't see any indication that it can do this. I would look at alternatives such as Fair Use Wizard or AutoGK for this type of work.

[frankmaster100]

No problem. I actually was looking into trying the Fair Use Wizard. I'll let you know.
thanks again.