I apologize in advance if this subject has been covered before, though I'm not finding anything pertaining to my issue with the forum's search feature.
I have a series of widescreen720p bluray rips that play back perfectly on my PC, though when testing them on three different media players and three different 16:9 televisions, the movie is vertically stretched to fullscreen, which is unwatchable. It seems that no matter what I try with the output settings for my media players as well as the televisions themselves, I cannot get black bars to appear at the top and bottom of the screen.
Is it possible that the black bars were omitted by the person that encoded the mkv? If so, I don't quite understand what the benefit would be - to my knowledge, black bars should never be cropped out when encoding videos. At least that's what I've read and heard from several folks over the last few years. Is it possible to losslessly correct this issue by remuxing the mkv, perhaps with Handbrake?
Okay, that worked wonderfully. I used MediaInfo to determine the aspect ratio (2.40:1)and input that into mkvmerge's aspect ratio field (2.40). Remuxing took less than 4 minutes on an aging quadcore system. This resolved my issue.
I hope others that have been puzzled by this see this thread.
Just wanted to add something. Using mkvmerge GUI to correct the aspect ratio could result in files that no longer seek or use chapters correctly with media players. Apparently, this is caused by a known bug. I was able to correct this by remuxing the original source file again, but using this commmand line parameter:
(edit: huh, new users aren't allowed to post links - it's in a thread at videohelp.com)
To do this, launch mkvmerge GUI (Im using v6.3.0) and click on "Muxing" in the main menu, then "Add Command Line Options". In the "Command line options" field, paste in the command line above and click OK. You may want to set this as the default for new jobs.
