Image "Squeezed / Squished" after rip

[pghpunk13]

So after ripping a triple feature BR - all three main film titles were "squished" to 4:3 aspect ratio. I've tried playing the files on 3 different players as well as on my PC with 2 different media players and all of them exhibit the same results. This is the first time I've ever had this issue. Any suggestions for rectifying this?

[pghpunk13]

I found a solution - Using MKVMerge v6.9.1 I remuxed the entire MKV - selecting the "no compression" for each stream, then selecting 16:9 under the video stream options.

[Woodstock]

There are two places the aspect ratio is stored on the disk - one is the directory, the other is the video stream. They're supposed to be the same, but that does not always work out.

The place I've seen this happen most often is when the BD contains video that is 4:3 with letterbox bars to fit the 16:9 BD format. That is, the video is actually around 1400x1080. The BD directory should mark it as 16:9 because of the letterbox bars, but it tags it as 4:3. The video stream has the correct value.

When you play it back, the 1920 width is squished into 1400, instead of the black bars being stripped off. The BD of Scrapped Princess was this way.

Handbrake and a (very few) players will read the stream information and ignore the MKV header.

MKVmerge is one of the ways to fix this, as you found out, by patching the incorrect header value. But, processing it through handbrake (which reduces the size of the video) will do it, too.

[strydrvn]

For OS X I used MKVToolNix v37.0.0. I was dealing with Friday Night Lights Bluray squishing. Turns out the header info "Video Display Height" and "Video Display Width" were both set to 1080. I removed those properties using the Header Editor section of the program, and it started playing correctly in Plex. I believe that without those, it defaults to "Video Pixel Height" and width. You could also just set the Display height and width to the correct size but decided to keep it simple since I was editing an entire season (22 files).

[Anung Un Rama]

I have MKVToolNix GUI v82.0 installed on my computer and there is no
"video stream" option menu. What are you talking about?

[flojo]

If it's a mkv file (not mp4), you can try to set the correct pixel display height and setting the display width to 0. Assuming the correct non-squished height is 480 (DVD R1) and the video is track 1 (which it probably is), then run:

Code: Select all

mkvpropedit --edit track:1 --set display-height=480 --set display-width=0 filename.mkv

If that doesn't work, then you'd have to remux the whole file with MKVToolNix GUI by selecting the video stream (usually the top track) and then editing the corresponding section in the "Properties" box on the right.