Movies reported as 4x3 720x480?

[woodchuck]

I just got done doing some VOBblanker work on my collection to remove previews, etc. I noticed many of my movies, when played, appear with "black bars" on the left and right AND on the top and bottom. Selecting media center Zoom 2 will resolve the problem and make everything appear ok. I'm wondering if this is normal? Is there something I should be doing to the source files to correct the 4x3, and make is 16x9 to make things right? I don't recall so many of my movies showing up with the "black bars" both top and bottom like this.

[richard1980]

It sounds to me like you've got a 16:9 image embedded in a 4:3 frame, and then WMC is further embedding the 4:3 frame in a 16:9 frame for output. Try extracting the original 16:9 frame out of the 4:3 frame into which it is currently embedded.

[makryger]

I'm not sure what source your movies are from, but I noticed a similar problem when I was converting some home movies from 8 mm to digital. It turns out, that a lot of the older ntsc formats actually record in 720 X 480, however the pixels are not square, and so they end up being 640x480 (4:3) in the end. I had to specify in Adobe Premier elements that the pixels were not square. Windows movie maker seem to detect this automatically. Either way, I had to convert it to a new format before the 640x480 image and the number of pixels actually matched up.

[woodchuck]

I'm starting to think my mucking with VOBblanker had nothing to do with this. I still need to confirm for some movies, but it would appear some were formatted in 4:3 "letterboxed" originally, which would explain what I'm seeing. I just need to zoom for these movies, I guess.