no need to be sorry at all, it started with your effort... the problem is the dvd, you can tell it's not the greatest

Dr Phibes, are those from your rip? You need to uncheck the "Follow ITU-R" button in gknot for 90% of anamorphic rips. That will bring the horizontal resolution closer to 400.

You might want to consider reducing your resolution too, looks like this one isn't going to hold together at 704x400 unless you do a rip @ 1.46GB. Have you done a compressibility test? what matrix are you using?

edit: oh you posted it already...

my dvd has also a strange format...it says 1.85 but it doesnt look like it..here is a couple of screens

There's nothing strange about that, that is ~1.83:1 non-anamorphic... what's weird about that AR? You just crop and there you go, the correct resolution.
I don't understand what's strange about that print, non-anamorphic widescreen is incredibly common for dvds. Sure its an inferior way of encoding, but there's nothing wrong with the screens you posted.
/me scratches head

anyway, those screens confirm that the resolution should be non-ITU for Dr. P's rip

I'm not used to that format...it has happend before but not very often..and I'm using AutoGK ..maybe I have to drop the "Auto" to do the cropping ?

yup, that's an extremely common format.


Basically you have three types of material, all three of which have been posted in this thread in fact. Firstly, is 4:3... bonified, either sourced like that (ie. old tv cameras, old cinema before ws) or open matte (the master before cropping to widescreen) or pan scan, that is cropped further from open matte. In the example of the first post that's pan scan *spit*

Next up is the joy to work with that is anamorphic. anamorphic is 16:9 content encoded at 4:3 because its much less wasteful than using black matting. In these cases your dvd player does the resizing for you on the fly, but because mpeg4 has the concept of encode resolution, that being the ability to store the AR in the headers properally without the need for black borders, you must appropriately setup your rip to be 16:9. Usually you must uncheck the follow ITU button found on the gknot dash, as if you don't you will have an AR that is slightly off, as was the case with Dr P. rip.

Next up is your material, this is 16:9 material but encoded non-anamorphically, meaning that black matting is required to maintain AR with MPEG2... you need to crop this as MPEG4 doesn't need black matte to maintain AR (infact black matte is a big waste of space for mpeg4).


In terms of quality, anamorphic is the best because of a number of reasons, but mostly the largest part of the resolution is spent on the real picture and not the borders amongst other things. anamorphic is what happens with higher quality masters, and with newer films.

Cheaper dvds opt for non-anamorphic encoding. You shouldn't be surprised, non-anamorphic DVDs are extremely common. i suspect if you own several widescreen dvds you'll find a lot of them are in non-anamorphic (it will say on the back of most dvd in fact). and the bottom of the barrel is usually 4:3.

ITU was unchecked for my rip

That's very odd since its about 3% off with that resolution, did you drop your vertical and horizontal resolutions to 8/8? I would expect the horizontal resolution to be greater so the AR looks better.

No not 8/8, cant remember what they were exactly but I do try messing with those to try to get as near to orig ar as i can