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Old 31st May 2017, 15:38   #43  |  Link
hello_hello
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Join Date: Mar 2011
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Logan9778 View Post
Edit: I'm working on one of my Fawlty Towers DVDs and it has 16 pixel wide black bars on both sides. So I re-calculated PAR assuming 688 pixels width was the actual video, and came out with 48:43 PAR. 12:11 never did look exactly right. Circles are looking a lot better! I'm beginning to think some of the time, wider or thinner bars than 8 pixels wide might mean a custom PAR. I just can't believe how they did whatever they felt like in putting these videos to DVD. Even the old CRTs wouldn't have played some of them at correct AR.
I wouldn't say it means a custom PAR was used as such as there's no logical reason for doing so, but I'll have to drag my Fawlty Towers DVDs out for a look because now you've mentioned it I have a vague memory of the grandfather clock face (next to the stairs) never looking quite round, even when using an ITU PAR. Are those "remastered"? I can't remember off the top of my head, but if they were remastered in a square pixel format before resizing for DVD, maybe someone stuffed up.

They wouldn't be the first DVDs with a large amount of black down the sides though, and sometimes it changes from scene to scene. My Men Behaving Badly DVDs are all over the place. I remember a few sections with well over 30 pixels of black down one side, but the picture aspect ratio still looked normal.
In those situations I'd crop the extra black and some extra picture from the top and bottom until what's left is 4:3 again, as that way it can be resized to the same 4:3 square pixels dimensions as the rest of the video.... if you're resizing to square pixels.... which I do.

Quite a while ago I encoded the extras from a Bluray. They were mostly SD, but many of them contained scenes from episodes, so I thought I'd resize them and compare the aspect ratio to the HD versions. An mpeg4 PAR wasn't right. If I remember correctly generic 16:9 resizing was much closer to the HD versions, although not perfect. That's the only time I've compared them like that, but it made me wonder if the mpeg4 PARs for SD Blu-ray are being ignored the same way ITU is for DVD.

Last edited by hello_hello; 31st May 2017 at 15:41.
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