HD to Anamorphic DVD ending up slightly squished
 

I'm in need of some serious help regarding aspect ratios. I'm encoding a 1440x1080 HD video to DVD and the end result is coming out ever so slightly squished horizontally. Here's the processes I've tried.

Convert 1440x1080 footage to 640x480 (that's 16:9 in 4:3 format)
Convert 1440x1080 footage to 720x405
Convert 1440x1080 footage to 720x480

All are then then encoded with CCE to MPEG and multiplexed with muxman, burned it to DVD with ImgBurn.

And yet none retain the correct aspect ratio of the original footage.

I'm trying 1440x1080 to 853x480, but I'm at my wit's end if that doesn't work.

Please, somebody, what are the magic numbers?!!!

Not that familiar with your encoding and multiplexing solutions, but, if I were doing this work with the tools I use (vegas, DVD Architect):

720x480 with a pixel aspect ratio of 1.2121. It's the pixel aspect ratio (PAR) that produces 16:9 in standard def... for which there should then be a flag set that it is widescreen/anamorphic in your encoding/authoring environments.

Or, are you really authoring this to the DVD-Video spec for a DVD set-top player, or to an MPEG file on a DVD-Data disc for computer playback?

On another subject, a common source of "slight" squishing is playing a 16:9 DVD on a 16:10 computer monitor that is set to "fill screen" instead of "preserve aspect". All the widescreen computer monitors are actually 16:10.

Hope this helps.

Seth,
I am authoring to DVD-video. The "slight" squishing is still occuring on my set top box player. when viewing it on my projector at home, I can spot some small black bars on either sides that appear to be the result of the image being 'squished' horizontally ever slightly so.

The black bars are added when I multiplex, so I've traced the problem to muxman, but I really don't have any other options--Adobe Encore crashes every time I try to use it.

Perhaps the encoded file is somehow not precisely 720x480, but slightly skinnier, and the black bars get added when it gets multiplexed to DVD to standard 720x480? I really don't know what's going on here.

Fixed! I used IFOEdit instead. Honestly I'd still like to know what is going on there--muxman has a lot of advanced options and maybe I'm just not familiar with it to have set it up properly.

It is actually normal to see black bars on the right and left of 8 pixels if your software downscaled correctly.

720x480 @ 1.33 Pixel Aspect Ratio (Widescreen) is not a perfect 16:9 frame. Its actually a little bit wider. So basically you have 3 choices:

A) You can have a perfectly proportionate downscale without cropping any pixels, and you will have 8 pixels of black on each side (right and left)

B) You can have it fill the entire frame when it downscales, without any cropping and no black on the sides, however your image will be slightly stretched horizontally by 16 pixels (barely noticeable)

C) You can have a perfectly proportionate downscale, filling the entire frame without any black, however you will have to crop a little off the top and bottom of the image (for it to fill the entire width)