Hi

I am hoping that the video conversion gurus can help me with an issue converting TV recordings to play on a WD HD TV player.

I have two DVD recorders (Panasonic DMR-EH68 and an older DMR-E85H) that I have used to record a bunch of movies etc off TV over the years. These record fine, and play back in the correct aspect ratio when I play them on either of the Pannys or on a stand-alone DVD player. With the falling cost of hard drives I have been compressing the recordings as AVIs using the xvid codec. (Note: I don't want to litigate AVI/codec choice if possible, I know there are better ones, but xvid/divx is almost the universal "mp3" of video, and most equipment including dvd platers with USB slots will play it). The conversion tool I am using is Fairuse Wizard v2.8, which seems to do a good job, is fairly fast, and allows for batch encoding to run overnight. I have converted about 500 recordings and they play on my computer just fine using Videolan and Media Player Classic. Widescreen films come out as widescreen (as they should) on the PC screen.

I recently added a Western Digital HD TV player to my setup. While it plays other files just fine, it pillarboxes my recordings (which are in widescreen) so that I get everything "crunched" vertically and black bars at the side. Unlike the PC the WD TV unit doesn't seem to realise the aspect ratio should be 16:9 and not 4:3. I can fix this by using MPEG4Modifier to modify an AVI and change the pixels from square to displaying as 16:9. However, if I do this, while the file plays fine on the WD TV, it is now is horrible and horizontally stretched on the PC.

I am hoping there is something simple that I am doing wrong, as I have quite a few more recordings to convert - and I am after converted files that play fine on both the laptop and the WD TV unit (I don't want to duplicate each file).

Hoping someone has some suggestions to offer.