| Quote: |
Why do people always make things so complicated? Would life be too easy without such burdens? |
It's stored that way on DVD, ask ITU why...
PAL & NTSC digital video is build in compatibilty with PAL & NTSC analog video. That's why the DVD's store data this way...
Analog video has only a vertical resolution expressed in lines, which are analog sampled in a certain Mhz (mostly 13.5MHz for consumer bussiness)
The 13.5MHz gets translated into a digital resoution of 720 non square pixels
This one is so wide because it does the same as a widescreen CRT television would do if you play back a 16:9 DVD: stretching
The screenshots of this one are from the mp4 in the .mkv container. The mkv displays 1024.
1026 instead of 1027? VLC doesnt display the incomplete 1027th pixel (in fact 1026.9 pixels)
So why doing this in a rip?
the PAR can be seen as a kind of compression, converting to hardcoded square pixel can do two things:
-Giving your codec more unneeded information to compress, 1024 instead of 704 (= bigger file or less quality) (never done)
-Because of this: the rip gets downsampled, but you reduce the information in the vertical resolution, while coding the rip, the stretched image of 1027 pixels gets downsampled to 704 pixels, so horizontally, the codec has as much data to compress, plus the data is already a downsampling of upsampled information. It may be far more easy to do it this way, but in keeping the best quality/data ratio, it's in fact a big shame...:
Vertically you get the sharpness of a big stamp and horizontally, the data is already twice resampled before it reaches you...without any gain in compression or quality.
In this rip, you get a mp4 recode of the DVD, it's more like a format conversion from an interlaced MPEG2 with overscan to a progressive MPEG4 (h.264) with overscan stripped of. Reducing resolution will even more destroy the depth-of-field as the telecine and MPEG2 conversion did. (This means there will be less dynamics in sharpness, everything will look sharp after a while, also what wasn't intended to be. And the sharp only stays sharp as long as you watch it in small format, when you watch downsampled rips on a big screen, everything will be vague...)
Loss of dept-of-field is already a big problem in PAL & NTSC due its small resolution compared to the information a 35mm or 16mm film contains. Even the High-Definition 4K resolution (about 4times HD1080p big) is generally considered as a bit inferior to 35mm pelicule. So losing even more, without reducing your files size, or gaining on compression quality a lot, is plain stupid.
I can understand maybe for 1CD Divx/Xvid rips, the reduced vertical resolution and the loss of dept-in-field (=sharper illusion) can just do that to make it watchable without blocking. But with the better h.264 (mp4 part 10) this is history, The compression algorithms are so much better that it should be possible to reach equal quality with about half the file size.
H.264 is wath BD and probably also HD-DVD uses, so probably the stand-alone HD-players will support h.264. Although I have no personal experience in this...
Doing a non-square pixel rip correct can't be easily done with available GUI's
PAR's are mostly being rounded (128:117 from 4:3 PAL becomes 12:11, for instance)
Also, NLE-editors such as Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro stretch 720 pixels to 768 (4:3) or 1024 (16:9).
All that falls out of the middle 702 pixels should in fact be discarded, 720 pixels should become 787 (4:3) or 1050 (16:9) pixels in fact.
But don't bother about it.
Just keep in mind: play the file in VLC (or another decent player) and you've seen the movie as intended!
For the diehards who own a nice big CRT monitor on their computer:
-Demux the .mkv
-Remux it (with mkvToolNix mkvmerge for instance)
-Tell the .mkv to display it in square pixels (display size 704x432 in this case)
-Create a custom resolution: 704x768@75 or 100 Hz (or with newer nVidia drivers, take double resolution, it doesn't allow anything below 800x600)
-note: for 4:3 movies, it should be 704x576 or the double)
-Adjust your screen right (so it fits nicely), (to be correct, adjust it about the size of two pix larger horizontally)
-Play the movie, you're CRT hardware will stretch the pixels for you, which delivers superior viewing quality, without any resampling)
Note: Don't try this with you're fancy flat screen monitor, these only have one resolution, all the others are ugly resamples. (For years we hailed the MultiSync monitors, and now we get this...)
Sorry if I made your movie experiences more complex...
Any ideas? The images are 1026 in width. Maybe it is an equation or something. 
