When playing DVD, TV picture switches ratio constantly.

[MrRalphMan]

All,

I have a very troublesum disk.. Thomas and the Magic Railway.
My 2yr old loves it, but when I play it the screen switches between 14:3 and widescreen modes, which is a right royal pain.
No other disk does this and strangly it does not always does it.. Just most of the time.

Any ideas?

Many Thanks,

Paul

[AlanHK]

Use DVDDecrypter to pull the files off the DVD.
There are plenty of guides listed on the Tool section here.

Get the movie(s) as MPEG files, then run Restream on it to set the aspect ratio correctly, and then reauthor with the (hopefully) fixed file.

[thecoalman]

Does it switch randomly or between scene changes at the same point everytime?

If it's the latter then most likely that is the way it is inteneded to be viewed. If they had mixed sources they may for example just resused footage from the broadcast show and the new footage created for the DVD was 16:9. You can have 4:3 and 16:9 on the same disc, each scene can be flagged differently and the DVD player will adjust the aspect accordingly.

If you look in your DVD player settings you should have an option to force it to play full screen all the time to ignore the flags.

If it's just doing it randomly with no rhyme or reason that would be very odd.

[MrRalphMan]

Thanks Guys, it's just random.

Thanks for the tip with restream, but it's a pain as it's an original disk. Oh well might have to get some DL Disks, don't want to lose any detail on Thomas..