Converted video squashed on ipod

[electric shepherd]

Hi everybody, I wonder if someone could help.

I've converted some video for my ipod but for some reason it plays back 'squashed' on the ipod.

It's 16:9 video and I've encoded it at 320x180 [using the video wizard]. It plays back correctly in itunes and on QT Pro but when I sync it to my ipod the video plays back as though it is cinemascope with the video squeezed and bigger black bars than expected.

I don't know what's going wrong here, I've encoded other videos with no problems but this seems really odd.

Any ideas?

[Midiman]

Hard to say. Have you tried the widescreen setting in the iPod itself?

[electric shepherd]

Hard to say. Have you tried the widescreen setting in the iPod itself?

Yes, with widescreen on I get the problem I've described, with it off I get a full screen pan & scan image with the sides cropped off.

The video should be anamorphic, but I can't see what difference that should make either as I've encoded anamorphic video with these settings before and had no problems.

[Midiman]

I'd need to see a log.

[electric shepherd]

OK, I'll do another conversion and post a log. Thanks.

[msopnet]

Use the prog at the bottom of my signature below.

[electric shepherd]

Thanks msopnet, that sounds promising!

Does that mean that if I encode using MPEG4 instead of H264 then I won't get this problem either?

[msopnet]

I've never seen it happen with MPEG-4. But H.264 is a better codec overall, I still use it even though I have to run all my videos through that program when they finish converting.

[electric shepherd]

Use the prog at the bottom of my signature below.

Great, that worked!!!

Is there a not too technical explanation as to what's going wrong here?

[msopnet]

H.264 has Aspect Ratio "flags" that are set by Videora.

These flags (ratios, in this case) tell the player (iPod) how to display the video. There are 3 possible flags:
1. Storage Aspect Ratio (SAR): This is basically the resolution at which your video is stored; in your case, 320:180 is the SAR.

2. Pixel Aspect Ratio (PAR): This one is more complicated, read slowly. It is the ratio of how the video's pixels should be stretched to be displayed correctly. For example, suppose you accidentally encoded your movie to be 160x180 - everything would look extremely thin. You could either redo the entire encode, or you could set PAR=X:Y=2:1. This tells the player that the X pixels should be twice as wide as the Y pixels are tall, so in the end it would display at the 320x180 aspect ratio.

3. Display Aspect Ratio (DAR): This is the aspect ratio the video will be displayed at.

The equation is DAR = SAR * PAR.

You usually will get this stretching problem in Videora if you crop or resize yourself. It's a known problem, I'm hoping it gets fixed in a future release.

Let me know if that makes sense...

[electric shepherd]

It certainly does, thanks for that!