Question about online distribution

[Cannonaire]

You are correct as long as the player is any good and the file has the correct DAR.

[HalOfBorg]

And as to you other question of why people put stuff up incorrectly, It's simply a case of them "doing it wrong." A lot of people fail at AR stuff. Hell, I know someone that's been editing for going on a decade and has made over 100 vids and they still can't get it right.

Sometime in the future, this will be me, assuming I continue on in the hobby. I can't get it right, never will. Most of what was said above makes no sense to me. I can read the words, even the definitions, but the whole thing simply makes my brain go "duuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhh".

[Zarxrax]

It's pretty simple, really.
The DVD is 720x480 pixels. In order to be 4:3 it has to be resized to 640x480.
You can either resize it yourself, or when you encode it, you can set an aspect ratio flag. This flag will tell the player to resize the video in realtime during playback.
So no matter what, the video has to be resized. Its just a matter of when and how.

[jediphoenix]

It's pretty simple, really.
The DVD is 720x480 pixels. In order to be 4:3 it has to be resized to 640x480.
You can either resize it yourself, or when you encode it, you can set an aspect ratio flag. This flag will tell the player to resize the video in realtime during playback.
So no matter what, the video has to be resized. Its just a matter of when and how.

That would be the Sample Aspect Ratio setting under Zarx264, correct?
The Xvid guide talks about it as well but doesn't go into detail since it says that the video should be square pixels.
Now, I also thought that 720x480 was 4:3, just with a different PAR?

[mirkosp]

Yes, 720x480 is 4:3 with 0.9 PAR (well, not exactly 4:3... it's a TL;DR thing you don't care about, let's say).
And well, flagging in avi is hit and miss because it's not quite a proper feature of the container, so some players might work, others would break, hence why for avi it's suggested to do 1.0 distro encodes. But for mp4 and mkv encodes with x264, it's fine to just flag it. And yes, it would be the Sample Aspect Ratio setting in zarxgui.

[jediphoenix]

Ah, and DVDs, even though they're 720x480 in .9 PAR don't have that hit and miss issue because they're, well, DVDs and not AVIs?

[jediphoenix]

More on the 'hit and miss' with AVIs without square pixels, I've been able to play an amv of mine encoded for a con, at 720x480, and it seems to be fine on multiple computers with different players - perhaps the TMPGEnc takes care of that when it encodes?

[Zarxrax]

When you say tmpgenc, you mean you are encoding an mpeg2? Yes, mpeg2 has an aspect ratio flag, so its fine.

[BasharOfTheAges]

Up to this point you were talking about distro copies, no? MPEG2 hasn't been a standard distribution codec for like 8 years.

[jediphoenix]

Up to this point you were talking about distro copies, no? MPEG2 hasn't been a standard distribution codec for like 8 years.

I know, I was just thinking how I'm able to watch my amv that was made for the convention, encoded as MPEG2, on multiple computers without having 'hit and miss' issues given that it's an AVI.


I've just personally never seen those kinds of issues on computers with videos that don't have square pixels.