Doctor M said:The MP4Modifier isn't a good answer. AVI isn't suppose to carry AR information so many players (MPC, standalone, etc.) tend to ignore whatever you patch it as.
Actually, once patched it works great in MPC as well as Windows media player and several players in Linux. If anyone finds a major program that doesn't use the correct aspect ratio after the patch, please let me know and I'll look into it.
MKV natively supports pixel and display aspect ratios and makes a good alternative, but it will of course be unplayable on standalone units.
I'm trying to stick with something that is the most compatible, and so AVI was the choice. I'll look into MKV though. Don't really know much about it.
Btw, conventional wisdom would have had you also crop the black bars on the top and bottom to save bitrate. (Would have also preferred the original DD5.1 track to mp3.)
Yes, you're right. I should have done cropped the letterboxing. I was having so many issues and wanted to get it out quickly, it slipped my mind. I think the addition to file size is neglegible though, since that area basically never changes and so is extremely compressible.
Regarding the 5.1 track, it's not at all mixed yet, so I didn't have a choice to use it. I could have used a different compressor than MP3, but at 192kbps, I think it sounds very good to my ear, and I wanted to save as many bits for video as possible.
...but no one EVER gets their first DivX/XviD encode attempts right. :-)
Really try AutoMKV, it supports XviD as well as X264 and is a tweaker's dream.
Thanks, I'll check it out.
Edit: The real problem is you exported to a lossless codec, which unlike an authored DVD contains no information about the display aspect ratio. You have to specifically set the resize and cropping.
In avisynth it would be: crop(2,58,-2,-64).Spline36Resize(844,356).
(Note: This overcrops by one line on the bottom, and slightly shrinks the video (about 2 lines vertically). The reason is that black borders are a sharp edge that Xvid codecs must spend lots of bitrate keeping intact. The resize brings the resolution to mod4 which improves the codec efficiency as well (without introducing aspect ratio error).)
A good way to go would be to create an avisynth script with those settings, use AutoMKV and select the AVS for the video, and the original file (or the .ac3 file if you have it, or mp3 if you want to use one you've already encoded) for the audio track.
Thanks for the info. I appreciate the advice.
Have you watched it yet?
-T