Handbrake and the 4:3 Aspect Ratio

[Bugsmer]

I've been experimenting with Handbrake since yesterday. I'm using it to de-interlace some of the cartoons on the Academy Award Animation Collection. The interlacing problem disappears, but the aspect ratio is wider than it should be (even though, under "Size", it lists the ratio as 1.33). I changed the width to 400 and the height to 300, giving it a 4:3 aspect ratio, but the picture becomes too small. If there's anyone who has used Handbrake successfully, please, let me know what I'm doing wrong.

[Bradskey]

I've been experimenting with Handbrake since yesterday. I'm using it to de-interlace some of the cartoons on the Academy Award Animation Collection. The interlacing problem disappears, but the aspect ratio is wider than it should be (even though, under "Size", it lists the ratio as 1.33). I changed the width to 400 and the height to 300, giving it a 4:3 aspect ratio, but the picture becomes too small. If there's anyone who has used Handbrake successfully, please, let me know what I'm doing wrong.

If you want a larger picture then increase the resolution to 640x480, bitrate roughly 1300kbps 2-pass, that's full vertical resolution for the source material. For more details about how Handbrake handles anamorphic, A/R, and decomb/deinterlacing, etc I'd go read/ask at their forum:

http://forum.handbrake.fr/

[Bugsmer]

Thanks, Bradskey. Your advice solved my problem. The cartoons now look great!

[Ray Pointer]

I've been experimenting with Handbrake since yesterday. I'm using it to de-interlace some of the cartoons on the Academy Award Animation Collection. The interlacing problem disappears, but the aspect ratio is wider than it should be (even though, under "Size", it lists the ratio as 1.33). I changed the width to 400 and the height to 300, giving it a 4:3 aspect ratio, but the picture becomes too small. If there's anyone who has used Handbrake successfully, please, let me know what I'm doing wrong.

I'm a bit confused here. I thought that a ratio of 3 x 4 is 1 to 1.33. At least THAT is what the television standard has been according to what I have been taught, read in SMPTE Journals, and have been experiencing until the recent introduction of HD, which seems to be merely a wide screen format. Also the order of measurements normall places the small number first as in 9x16 not 16x9 as is currently used. However, 4x4 or 16x9 is supposed to be the proportion of the width to the height, isn't it?
Can this be part of the problem mentioned? Who wants to "argue" the point?

[Bradskey]

In my experience with computers, with displays, images, and digital video, the convention, when talking about actual graphical resolution, is [width]x[height]. Then when you start talking about aspect ratio and come up with the resolution-independent LCD, you get 4:3 or 16:9 (using conventional resolutions with square pixels of course), which is then simplified further sometimes to 1.33 or 1.77 which is simply the width/height rounded (or truncated rather). Obviously both are really shorthand for reducing the denominator to 1, ie [1.33~]x[1] and [1.77~]x[1].

At any rate, in my experience Handbrake does things correctly, but playback software may not understand the output file correctly. When he says the file came out with an aspect ratio that looks too wide, even though it was supposed to be 1.33, I believe by default the auto-anamorphic encoding of Handbrake may have used all of the horizontal lines in the source material, ie 720x480, but also indicated A/R of 1.33 in the output file. I suspect then his playback software did not understand that the pixels were not square, ie 1:1, and thus displayed a somewhat horizontally stretched image. Just a guess, it could have been something else. By disabling anamorphic encoding and explicitly setting the resolution to 640x480 he gets a perfect 1.33 A/R with square pixels and fully preserves the vertical resolution of the source material. With sufficiently high bitrate PQ will be nearly indistinguishable from the original (plus he was able to decomb the video in the process, his apparent aim). :befuddled

[Ray Pointer]

In my experience with computers, with displays, images, and digital video, the convention, when talking about actual graphical resolution, is [width]x[height]. Then when you start talking about aspect ratio and come up with the resolution-independent LCD, you get 4:3 or 16:9 (using conventional resolutions with square pixels of course), which is then simplified further sometimes to 1.33 or 1.77 which is simply the width/height rounded (or truncated rather). Obviously both are really shorthand for reducing the denominator to 1, ie [1.33~]x[1] and [1.77~]x[1].

At any rate, in my experience Handbrake does things correctly, but playback software may not understand the output file correctly. When he says the file came out with an aspect ratio that looks too wide, even though it was supposed to be 1.33, I believe by default the auto-anamorphic encoding of Handbrake may have used all of the horizontal lines in the source material, ie 720x480, but also indicated A/R of 1.33 in the output file. I suspect then his playback software did not understand that the pixels were not square, ie 1:1, and thus displayed a somewhat horizontally stretched image. Just a guess, it could have been something else. By disabling anamorphic encoding and explicitly setting the resolution to 640x480 he gets a perfect 1.33 A/R with square pixels and fully preserves the vertical resolution of the source material. With sufficiently high bitrate PQ will be nearly indistinguishable from the original (plus he was able to decomb the video in the process, his apparent aim). :befuddled

Isn't this all an awful lot of work? Why can't we just be happy to view the DVDs and be thankful that the material is being offered in such nice image quality?

[Bradskey]

It's this all an awful lot of work? Why can't we just be happy to view the DVDs and be thankful that the material is being offered in such nice image quality?

Hey I love DVD's, I buy lots of them. I've had some interest in digital video processing for a long time now. I'm not a total guru, but I have a decent understanding of some of the technologies available and some good reasonably simple tools to make use of them. To the degree that I get into it, its not that much work or complexity to me, I've done it enough. On rare occasion I've even been able to digitally correct some ridiculous flaw, like the swapped red and blue color channels in "Prowlers of the Everglade" on True Life Adventures Vol. 1

[Ray Pointer]

Hey I love DVD's, I buy lots of them. I've had some interest in digital video processing for a long time now. I'm not a total guru, but I have a decent understanding of some of the technologies available and some good reasonably simple tools to make use of them. To the degree that I get into it, its not that much work or complexity to me, I've done it enough. On rare occasion I've even been able to digitally correct some ridiculous flaw, like the swapped red and blue color channels in "Prowlers of the Everglade" on True Life Adventures Vol. 1

Have you considered sending your resume' out then? Once again, the fans seem more competent than the alleged "pros."

[Bradskey]

You flatter me sir! I don't know a lot about the DVD production business, but it seems pretty obvious to me that they sometimes go through the whole process and never once have somebody sit down and actually watch the final proposed disc image all the way through to catch the flaws... or they just don't care.

Anyway, I am into making good quality digital copies of my DVD contents for my own personal use, and have seen some interesting things after analyzing so many discs. I have something on the order of 1000+ DVDs in various box sets and single disc releases, and I continue to purchase them regularly. I think its ridiculous to expect me to dig through piles, stacks, and shelves of discs to find what I want to watch. Hollywood's solution is: we don't have one. So I made my own -- custom database, custom browse and playback software, centralized network attached storage for good quality digital copies of a large portion of my collection. A click of a button to watch video from any DVD I own is much simpler. I can even create playlists or generate programming -- a half hour of Looney Tunes, an hour of Three Stooges or anything I fancy. I could program my own Saturday morning. Just an on-going pet project of mine the past couple of years.