Widescreen DVD being converted to 4:3 format

[tatts4Life]

So I have a number of movies that are either labeled as fullscreen or widescreen. But for some reason when I rip say Lady in the Water which is labeled as widescreen edition with makemkv it becomes 4:3, I get black bars on the side. There aren't any black bars on the top. It pretty much converts it to the old standard def tv square look.

Any idea what could be going on?

[Woodstock]

DVD video is always 4:3. Wide-screen means you have a lower actual resolution, because the video is mapped to PART of the 720x480, with black bars filling in the rest. If you compare the video quality between the "Wide screen" and "regular" screen versions, the WS is less sharp, because there are fewer "working" pixels.

MakeMKV copies this into the MKV file, which is then open to interpretation by your playback software/device. Most will recognize the black bars and hide them, rescaling the results to fill in the "real" aspect ratio, but some do not.

Programs like Handbrake, when compressing the file, will usually throw away the black bars, and give you a file with the a wide-screen display... but it is really just cropping the 4:3 screen to get rid of the bars, and then resizing it all to make it look better.

BD video, on the other hand, is 16:9, which means old 4:3 video released on BD can have some funky results, too. Default Handbrake settings will turn it into 1920x1440, which doesn't work on most devices....

[tatts4Life]

Thanks for the explanation. I think I finally understand what the issue it's stupid that so many good shows end up looking like crap when played on the computer. At least I've figured out how to stretch the video a little bit so the black bars aren't so noticeable. I've also noticed now that I found a codec to play MKV files that widescreen movies that have black bars on top now have thin black bars on the side too. I was able to mess around with handbrake and get them to go away.