Video appears stretched or squashed
The video appears to be stretched in one direction. Circles now appear as ovals and people are taller or wider than they should be.
Result Original Image
Possible Causes:
Widescreen MPEG-2 output – If your output is widescreen MPEG-2, then this is not a problem. Some MPEG-2 playback software does not properly size the video playback according to the aspect ratio set in the MPEG-2 file. Thus, widescreen MPEG-2 files play back squashed. Authoring a widescreen DVD using this file and playing that DVD on a DVD player will produce a correct widescreen result.
Player does not compensate for pixel and frame aspect ratio – Some media players do not compensate for video with non-square pixels and thus do not display video in the proper aspect ratio. This is not a problem with the encoding or ProCoder 3; it is a problem with the player. Try to find a player that properly compensates for non-square pixel playback.
Incorrect source aspect ratio setting – Check the aspect ratio setting in your source file. If it is set incorrectly, ProCoder 3 will interpret the shape of the video image incorrectly and therefore process it incorrectly. ProCoder 3 never does anything to stretch or squash the image – widescreen sources converted to standard screen size will be scaled to fit into the standard width, a process known as letterboxing, as shown in the image below.
4:3 Letterboxed video