4:3 Movies Play Widescreen

[WJWM]

I'm trying to burn an old movie (captured in eyeTV) to disk so that it can be played by Apple's DVD Player. My problem is that this 4:3 format movie plays back at 16:9 and the Apple software doesn't let you change that. If I play it through VLC or the Roxio Video Player there are menu items for setting the playback aspect ratio but it does not pick it up automatically.

 

The settings I have in Toast 11 are Aspect Ratio 4:3 under Options/Customize/Encoding - I've also tried Reencoding Automatic and Never but that makes no difference.

 

The only way that I seem to be able to get the film displaying automatically at the right aspect ratio is to export from eyeTV as for Apple TV (.m4v) and then to burn that via Toast. As a workaround that's fine but I don't understand why Toast doesn't seem to do what I think it should.

[tsantee]

I can't think of any reason for that to occur. I'm also curious why you want to create a DVD when you're going to play it on the Mac. Why not just play the movie from EyeTV or play the exported .m4v video instead?

 

How did you add the video to Toast? Did you use the EyeTV link in Toast's Media Browser? Did Toast say it was encoding or multiplexing the video? Which EyeTV capture device are you using?

[WJWM]

What I was actually doing was playing the movie from a disk image to see how it might appear if burnt to disk. Odd thing to do? Maybe.

 

I got it into Toast by dragging from EyeTV. Toast encoded and multiplexed it except when I selected Reencoding Never. I have an EyeTV Diversity device.

[tsantee]

It makes sense to preview the video from the disc image. I'm don't know why it got stretched to 16:9. The instruction for the aspect ratio is written to the .IFO file. When Toast recognizes the source as being other than a 4:3 video it writes the .IFO instruction to playback as either anamorphic 16:9, letterbox or pan & scan depending on the settings of the DVD player. It should write the instruction to play back as 4:3 when starting with a 4:3 video. This item in the .IFO can be edited using the freeware application MyDVDEdit. To use it you need to copy the VIDEO_TS folder out of the disc image to the hard drive so you can change the permissions to Read & Write.

 

How does Toast describe the specs of that video when you've added it to the Toast window?