Wrong Aspect Ratio on Toshiba 1850 Portable - How To Fix?

[bluehz]

I have a Toshiba 1850 portable DVD player that has a known issue not respecting the correct aspect ratio in MPEG/DIVX files. I have tried everything under the sun to output proper 4/3 aspect videos that will play without being stretched on this player and I am coming up empty. Very frustrated at this point. I am not a novice in the video conversion game - been doing it a while, so CLI and advanced options are not an issue. I tried everything I can think of. I have an Ubuntu box setup that I use for video conversion and some of the tools I am trying are AcidRip, DVD::RIP, mencoder (CLI), FFMPEG (CLI), and others.

Can anyone offer some suggestions on getting these 4/3 MPEG/DIVX videos to play properly on this player or even another format I might use - preferable with a fair amount of compression as I am trying to compile several videos onto single disks for kids car ride dvd's.

- thx

EDIT - I have a custom built FFMPEG I compiled for Linux with ALL the options available - not the stock multimedia build that is floating about.

[jagabo]

So Divx files are always stretched fill the 16:9 display? Then resize the video to a 4:3 size and add pillarbox bars left and right to bring the full frame size up to 16:9. For example, size the video to 480x360 then add 80 pixel thick bars to the left and right to make 640x360.

[bluehz]

Yes the player has a bug in it that doesn't respect the aspect ratio. O was thinking of adding the pillar bars as you suggested but have yet to figure out how to do it with mencoder.

- thx

[jagabo]

I don't know mencoder but in AviSynth it would be:

LanczosResize(480, 360)
AddBorders(80, 0, 80, 0)