Hi,
I've read your PM, and had a look at a couple of your videos (not many, I'm at military service right now and having to put up with an awfully slow connection). All the videos I've viewed have wrong aspect ratios, both the original files and when viewed on the FL350 viewer.
I think you must be confusing things a bit. Regarding the black bars, there are 3 ways to work with 16/9 video.
- You encode your video in a 16/9 ratio, with square pixels. For 720px wide, that's 405 pixels high. In practice codecs want numbers of pixels that are even, sometimes also dividable by 4, so we usually use 720x404. To do this, you do just like I mentioned earlier, by defining frame size in Windows media encoder. I actually don't know where you got the 720x432 number. By doing this, the video frame encoded in the video file is like this:
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b105/Kilrah/720_404.jpgThere are no black bars in the video, but the player will add them if necessary.
- You encode the video in a 4/3 frame size (e.g 720x576), but with anamorphic pixels. The actual frame that is stored in the video file looks like this:
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b105/Kil..._anamorphic.jpgThe image is "squished", but the file will store information saying that it should be played with the pixels "stretched" to a 4/3 ratio instead of being square (4/3 frame x 4/3 pixel = 16/9 image). So, the player will know it needs to stretch the image, and will play it back as 1024x576. This is what is used in the FL350 tutorial using the "allow nonsquare pixel output" and "widescreen DV" aspect ratio info. There are no black bars in the video frame either. This is preferable to the first method described above because intead of fixing width and cutting on height, you keep height and expand the width, thus keep more image data, and get better quality, which is why it was retained for the FL350 standard. This also matches how widescreen DV works, so there is no resizing taking place, avoiding some quality loss it would induce.
- You create a "letterboxed" video, meaning you add black bars to a 16/9 video frame to make a 4/3 image, and encode that. For example, you have a full 720x576 frame size, but only the 720x404 pixels of the first method actually contain the image:
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b105/Kil...letterboxed.jpgThis was used for compatibility with 4/3 analog TVs, but has no reason to be anymore nowadays. It has many drawbacks - firstly, you store a 720x576 image when you only actually use 720x404, the rest being just black. The encoder wastes space on encoding the black bars and has a hard time with the border of the image which appears as a sharp transition. And mostly, it's wasting space on all widescreen displays, which we now find everywhere. As the frame is 4/3, the display will fit the video on the height, which includes the black bars that are hard-coded, and add black bars on the sides, resulting in something that looks like this, with wasted screen space:
http://i18.photobucket.com/albums/b105/Kil..._widescreen.jpgAs far as I know, Windows media encoder can't do letterboxed video by itself. You need to do that in your editing software before you get to the encoding with WME.
So, one should really not encode in that format, so you surely do NOT want black bars in the video itself. You want the player to add them if necessary, which is done automatically with the other 2 methods.
For you, the simplest solution is the first one. If you manage to get the 2nd one to work by following the tutorial it's even better. But it's all simpler as it seems, I think you're searching too far.
If you're having more problems, if you could explain me more in detail what the exact problem is, maybe also send me bits of video (both original and encoded) as samples on my server
here, with what settings you used it would help.
The still for the example is taken from
video ID 11497.
