720p 1280x528 and 1280x544 look different, squashed or stretched?

[teddy4]

So I can find an encode of a movie at 1280x528 and a different encode of the same movie at 1280x544 and then compare them frame by frame.

It looks like either the 528 is slightly squashed vertically or the 544 is slightly stretched vertically. I would think the original AR would be maintained and the differences are just differences in cropping the black bars, but with the 544 people have noticeably longer foreheads


Is it that my vlc is badly setup or is the original AR not maintained when encoding a bluray as x264 720p, resulting in either slight squashing or stretching?

[davexnet]

It's more likely the A/R is sightly out on one of them. Often you see dimensions a factor of 16, sometimes rounded up,
sometimes down.

On the otherhand, there could be an overriding display aspect ratio, which some (most?) video players will honor.
You can find out by looking at the file details in mediainfo

[wulf109]

I'm going to assume these are mkv files. Many mkv files lack an aspect ratio flag. Just run them thru mkvmerge and it will correct the AR. I doubt anyone would notice a difference between 528 and 544 height if the AR is correct.

[johns0]

What program are you using to re-encode to blu-ray compliant files?Is the display aspect wrong when playing on a blu-ray player or just on your computer?