Any way to change Xvid aspect ratio?

[hoki_goujons]

It shames me to ask such a noob question - I'm a good alll-round geek, but video has always made me bleed from my eyes.

I watch Xvids on my Yamada MX105,on a 16:9 widescreen TV. A lot of the movies I watch don't fill the screen, and one I watched the other night wasted about half of it. Is there any way to change the AR of a movie to better fit the display device? The movie from the other night's details are as follows:

Video : 587 MB, 848 Kbps, 23.976 fps, 640*272 (2.21:1), XVID = XVID Mpeg-4

(from AVIcodec). Obviously this is way off from 16:9.

I'd be grateful for any advice.

[guns1inger]

You have three choices

1. Stretch the image vertically to artificially fill the screen. Everone will look tall and thin, but hey, you will get better use of your screen and won't burn out the middle section faster than the top and bottom.

2. You can crop the ends off and resize the lot to fill the screen. This will throw away about a quarter of the image and make the rest softer, but again, who cares so, long as you fill the screen, right.

or

3. Leave it as it was filmed and watch the whole image as the director intended. Film is not television, and doesn't fit into a nice formulaic box (at least, not if it's done right). The bars are not a curse, or a waste of space. Read this site http://widescreen.org/index.shtml to find out why you should not crop the image.

[manono]

It's wider than your TV set. It's supposed to have black bars above and below. Unless your TV or player has a Zoom to change it, you'll have to reencode it, and either stretch it to fill the screen with bad Aspect Ratio, or crop off a good bit of the sides, keeping the correct AR, but losing almost a quarter of the picture. I recommend leaving it alone and learning to love it.

Edit: oops, too slow. Hi guns1inger.

[hoki_goujons]

Thanks - that link cleared a lot of things up. I was aware that movies were shot in different ratios, and was even lucky enough to see Lawrence of Arabia in its original Super Panavision 70 at the local art house cinema a couple of years ago. I just thought that this one might have been fudged up by the person who encoded it - it was a recent and fairly mainstream movie.

Thanks for the replies anyway.