OK, I'm a semi-n00b at this stuff, so it's quite possible that I'm being really stupid about something incredibly basic here -- but I'm having aspect ratio problems with MeGUI and I hope someone can help me figure this out...

All I want to do is to rip all my (legitimately purchased) DVD main movies to high-quality MP4 files suitable for viewing on my PC and for streaming to my PS3. Ideally, I would like to preserve the DVD's chapter info, and possibly also retain a subtitle stream. MeGUI seems like the tool of choice, so that's what I have been trying. I found a really excellent MeGUI tutorial here (https://forum.videohelp.com/topic333634.html), and everything seemed pretty straightforward.

When I'm building the .avs script in MeGUI, the "original video" is noticably vertically "stretched". I figure this is normal, since the DVD video is encoded as 720x480 with a 9x6 aspect ratio, but MeGUI is displaying it as 1:1.

If I just allow MeGUI to auto-crop and then resize to suggested dimensions, everything works fine. For the movie "Legally Blonde" I end up with final, cropped movie file with dimensions 720x304 -- pretty close to 2.35:1.

Everything I have read suggests that it would be much better to encode in an anamorphic format, in order to get the best resolution. So I enable "clever anamorphic" and select "overcrop to achieve mod16". The resulting .avs cript looks like it is coded for a 2.35:1 display AR (darX=11887, darY=5000) -- which I *think* is correct, but even if I change it to something like 720x304, or 16x9, nothing seems to change.

No matter what I do, the "preview AVS" video is strethced vertically, as is the final produced .mp4 file.

Am I doing something wrong? Has anyone written a step-by-step for converting anamorphic DVDs with MeGUI using the "clever anamorphic" mode and getting the video to have the correct AR?

Thanks in advance for any help!