Moth3r said:

My media player (MPC-HC) played this back at the wrong AR, not sure if that's the fault of my player ignoring the aspect ratio flag, or if you didn't set it in the MKV in the first place (I didn't have time to check). Since compatibility with AR flags generally can be hit-and-miss, I would recommend you resize to 640 x 480 before encoding. Since the source is VHS which has limited horizontal resolution anyway, you wouldn't lose any detail.

Maybe consider the use of AAC instead of AC3 for audio, and MP4 instead of MKV for the container (formats that the pirate "scene" is now moving to - look up the SD x264 TV Release Standards 2012).

Odd, I did set the AR width to 640. It displays fine with VLC and my Popcorn Hour in the living room. I wouldn't rule out software weirdness on that one and I agree that sometimes it can be hit-or-miss.

I am not 100% certain that I want to drop the size down to 640x480 though. I would like to pack as much detail in there as possible, especially if these encodes last as long as the previous ones did (VCD set from 1990's are still all over the place).

In regards to the MP4/AAC suggestion, I was actually just thinking the same thing these last couple of days since the new scene standards have been revealed. I settled on MKV/AC3 a few months ago, but if new hardware over the next couple of years becomes more MP4/AAC friendly (which is likely to happen when the scene decides upon a standard) then that is probably the way to go. I am not packaging multiple audio tracks or subtitles so MKV isn't necessary.

So I will probably do some test encodes with MP4/AAC at 720x480 with an AR flag of 640 width and test them out on a few different media players to see if I have any problems. If I run into a bunch of incompatibilities then I will look into trimming them down to 640x480.

thanks!