Change apsect ratio without reencoding ?
 

Hi,

I have two very important DVDs which were recorded in 16x9 (one PAL, one NTSC) but squeezed to 4:3 on the DVD. There is no chance that I can get these DVDs remastered for me. Is it possible to chance the aspect ratio flag on them without reencoding? Would I have to rebuild the menu? Which program should I use?

Thanks for your help.

Gints: are you on Mac or PC?

I have both Mac and PC side by side, but I haven't spent any time with video tools on the Mac.

The simplest way I can see would be to use MPEG Streamclip to break the VOB files out to something you could re-encode and then author in DVD Studio Pro, choosing 16:9 letterbox as the display aspect on the track in question.

There may be a simpler solution but I'm at a loss.

The other question is: since 16:9 SD is anamorphic by nature, can you just change a menu setting in your DVD player to display the content correctly? My very first 16:9 DVD was Peter Gabriel's Secret World and it took me about a week to figure out that Peter wasn't really THAT tall and that I had set up my DVD player wrong (which I only realized when I played a DVD that hadn't set the anamorphic flag right).

Thanks for the tips. This is a master of a show on my martial arts group, so I want to make copies for my group. I'd rather figure out how to change the aspect ratio flag if possible, although the worst case is that the both of my sources squeezed the 16:9 material to 4:3 .

After you run mpeg-streamclip to extract the VOB files, you can input the extracted file to DVD Architect. In DVDA, change the project properties to 16:9 widescreen and tell DVDA to build the database. At that point, DVDA will tell you whether it has to re-encode the data or not. Until you do that, it's hard to answer the question.