Stretching Out Anamorphic DVD to 16x9

[RobMV03]

Hi,

I have DVDs that were made from a native 16x9 source and anamorphically squeezed into a 4x3 format (so the peoples faces look long and squished when played back without stretching). However, I can play the DVDs on my DVD player and stretch the 4x3 out to a 16x9 screen so it completely fills the screen without any quality loss. Is there a way to do this using Handbrake, so that when I play the file fullscreen on my 16x9 computer monitor, it will fill the whole screen

Thanks so much to anyone who can help

Rob

[JohnAStebbins]

You could use handbrake's custom anamorphic option in picture settings to change the aspect of the video back to it's correct setting. Then players on your pc will respect the aspect ratio encoded in the video an show it correctly. This requires reencoding your video however which always results in a small loss of quality. I would think there would be tools out there somewhere that will let you simply change the aspect ratio of the file without reencoding. But since I've never had to do that, I can't tell you how.

[creamyhorror]

Just use MKVMergeGUI to remux the encoded video, and specify the display aspect ratio when you do. No re-encoding required.

I think you can do the same with YAMB for MP4 files.