Making AVI full screen in Media Player or VS8

[cmfslc]

I captured a home video at 720X480 avi using my Leadtek winfast2000xp capture card (Huffy codec). It plays back full screen just fine using the winfast software that comes with the capture card, but it "squeezes and stretches" when it plays back in Windows Media Player or when trying to edit in Ulead Video Studio 8. It's like the 4:3 aspect ration was sqooshed and stretched to make it fit in letterbox--distorting the image so everybody looks fat. There are wide black bars on top and bottom.

I tried capturing at 352X480 and, of course, the opposite effect happened. The sides were all squooshed in and everybody looks tall and skinny.

How do I make it look normal?

This is particularly troubling when editing and overlay full screen still images. When rendered out, the avi portion is still squooshed and the stills are full screen and look normal.

I hope I'm making sense. Please help.

[flaninacupboard]

a PC monitor is 1:1 aspect, for an image to fill your screen it needs to be 4:3 (like 400x300, 800x600 etc).

Your video is 720x480, 1:1 would be 640x480. you will get black bars top and bottom on playback. the video will be correct after you've converted and are watching on DVD.

[poerschr]

Hate to disagree with the experts, but that is no real solution..If you burned it to a DVD the video would still be wrong....

The problem is caused by a flag in the video file that tells WMP and Ulead Video Studio 8 that the video is widescreen. This is wrong, but you can change it. You need a program called DVDpatcher or restream, both will work great. All you do is load the video file up into one of the programs and change the flag called "aspect ratio" from 16:9 to 4:3. 16:9 is widescreen, and 4:3 is fullscreen. Somehow the video got fixed with the wrong aspect ratio. It really easy to change, and will not have to encode or anything. It takes less than 30 sec.

[cmfslc]

I like your answer, except both programs you mentioned are for mpeg 2 files. I'm working with AVI. Is there a similar program for AVI?

P.S. I'm in the process of doing it the "hard way". I just bought TMPGenc and am converting all of the files to mpeg2 and will replace the 50+ AVI scenes with the encoded ones that are coming out the correct proportions. I'd heard AVI was easier to edit, but it looks like I'll have to redo the entire video as mpeg. Hope the transitions work okay.

[flaninacupboard]

yeah, mpeg supports aspect ratio flags, AVI generally doesn't. don't worry, you can do your edits in .avi and then encode to mpeg. when encoding to mpeg you can set your flag to 4:3.