Squashed picture/removing the fake black bar?

[Joolz2020]

On my WD player, some movies are 'squashed' to a really thin strip of video. Checking the original DVD, the player is definitely showing it wrong. My Samsung TV has a 'wide zoom' which compensates, but the aspect is still not quite right, apart from which it's very irritating having to mess around with TV settings all the time.

I'm sure I read posts elsewhere about some movies having a fake black bar to emulate a 4:3 aspect, but this is not the same I don't think. So I guess I'm wondering if there is some (free) software that will detect and remove the black bars, preferably from the already ripped VOB.

[guns1inger]

Depends on the video format and exactly what the problem is. If the issue is purely and incorrect aspect ratio setting, DVD Patcher can be used to change the AR flag values in VOB and MPG files. If it is Xvid/Divx encoded AVIs then mepg4modifier can be used. Both work without re-encoding, so they are fast and do not affect the quality.

You cannot remove bars without re-encoding. Xvid4PSP has a black bar detection routine that it uses to crop when encoding