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These days, my displays are all high-def widescreen, but the vast majority of classic black & white "academy ratio" (1.375) movies are still only available on NTSC DVD, with some only released on PAL DVD -- and all these were created for 4:3 SDTV screens. I would like to rip those to my media server for display on my big HDTV, but I would like to do it "properly" and I'm not sure of a few details. In particular, I am wondering if anyone knows if when the DVD's were made, if the classic 1.375 films were "squished" to 1.333 aspect ratio, or did publishers crop the sides a little? Since HDTV's are plenty wide, if the DVD's were "squished", the right ripping strategy would be to specify a 1.375:1 ratio, since the pixels are being interpolated anyway for HDTV resolution.
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Originally Posted by Nerva
"Ripping" is a 1:1 digital copy. There is only 1 way to do it "properly"
There are "no other details", since DVD's are either 4:3 or 16:9 . Any other content aspect ratio means it either has letterbox (if wider) or pillarbox(if narrower) hardcoded into the picture. So if your media server setup can playback ISO's or VOB's or even as MPG with the original DVD AR signalling, that's what a "rip" is.
If you're asking how to go about re-encoding it, not a "rip", you can still encode it the same way it was on the DVD with aspect ratio flags. If your media server doesn't acknowledge these flags then you would have to use "square pixel" equivalents by resizing.
Even if someone knew exactly what was done to "typical" DVD's of that period, that doesn't mean your DVD uses the same method. Also , often there are different studios that release the same film and have slightly different AR's due to production differences.
So there is no way to know precisely what the REAL aspect ratio should be or should have been, short of measuring a known object like a round wall clock, or car tire, with a shot straight on, not at an angle -
It's all 4:3. The only way to get an academy ratio copy is to get your hands on a 35mm print. Any DVD company that was concerned enough to make a 1.375 copy for its discerning customers would surely make a big deal of it on the box.
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In my experience, neither. They wer letterboxed with small borders top and bottom, on a 4:3 DVD. Very often made from video tape rather than going back to the original film. Meaning they use a rec.601 aspect ratio with the 4:3 picture in a 704x480 portion of the 720x480 frame.Originally Posted by Nerva
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Websites like www.imdb.com usually disclose the original aspect ratio of the film. Original because as poisondeathray writes they may have produced the DVD differently.
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If you just rip the DVDs as-is, all video playing software I know of will resize it to exactly 4:3 on playback. I don't use a media server, so whether that'd make a difference, I don't know.
In my experience pretty much all 4:3 DVDs use an ITU aspect ratio (not exact 4:3 resizing), so of the 720x480 (or 720x576) resolution, 704x480 should be resized to 4:3. Or in other words, 720x480 would be slightly wider than 4:3. The resize calculator I use says it's 1.36559664 for NTSC and 1.36574074 for PAL. Regardless of the original movie aspect ratio, the DVD aspect ratios don't change, so small black bars may have been used or part of the picture cropped etc to match the DVD aspect ratio.
To get a player to resize the ripped video to that aspect ratio automatically, you'd probably need to mux it into a container that lets you set the aspect ratio. ie MKV and MKVMergeGUI.
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