Playing a 16:9 avi from USB through DVD player--it's displaying at 4:3. Help?

January 13, 2012 2:37 PM

How can I get a downloaded .avi that is 16:9 to display properly on a 4:3 tv (with setting options)? The tv *does* play 16:9 DVDs just fine.

I'm truly desperate and I would greatly appreciate any help available.

The dealio:

DVD player: A Samsung BD-D5700. You can read about it here, and there's a link to download the instructions in .pdf format in the article.

Plays downloaded .avi files off of a USB stick--but here's the problem. The downloaded .avi files are of shows in 16:9, and the tv is 4:3.

Regular movie or TV-show DVDs that are in 16:9 play just fine (with black bars across the top and bottom). But downloaded .avi files that are in 16:9 only play in 4:3. The problem (I'm assuming) is that the .avi file does not have the "this is a 16:9 file" information encoded for the DVD player to read.

The tv has four screen settings to choose from: 4:3, 4:3 full, 16:9, and 16:9 full. We've tried 4:3, and we've tried 16:9 full (which seem to be the only options). The player is new, so we're not entirely familiar with what kinds of options we have.

If anyone has an automatic "Yup, I know how to fix it" answer, that would be great.

If anyone is willing to go the extra mile and download the instruction manual pdf, that would be amazing.

If anyone knows how to hook up a laptop to the DVD player, and play the .avi file off of the laptop, and you think that will fix it, please let me know.


If anyone knows of a way to *convert the .avi file into something that will fix it*, I am willing to do that.

posted by tzikeh to Technology (4 answers total)

Assuming that your player respects aspect ratio information stored in the video stream itself, MPEG4-Modifier should do what you need to do by simply modifying some header information.

Should this fail, you can see whether your player supports aspect ratio flagging in the Matroska container, which is also supported by your player: simply drag and drop your AVI file into the "Input files" area of mkvmergegui, part of the mkvtoolnix suite, highlight the video stream under "Tracks, chapters, and tags", click the "format specific options" tab in the low middle of the window, and set either "aspect ratio" or "display width/height" to an appropriate value. Click "Start muxing" and in a minute or two you'll have a new Matroska file to test with your player.

Should all of this fail, you're looking at re-encoding the video stream. This may only be worth your time if the creator of the file did at least a fair job of picking an appropriate resolution and bitrate; otherwise you may be left with no reasonably good options.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 2:55 PM on January 13, 2012

Response by poster: Inspector.Gadget, do you know how to modify the file with MPEG4-Modifier? Or can you point me to the instructions?
posted by tzikeh at 3:06 PM on January 13, 2012

You open the program and then select your AVI file via "Browse...". Select the appropriate option in either "Pixel AR" or "Display AR". So, building an example from your question, if you had a 720x480 AVI file that was created from a US DVD, you could set "Pixel AR" to "16:9 NTSC", then click "Save..." and select the name and location of your output file.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 3:19 PM on January 13, 2012

Do you have the correct aspect set on the blu-ray player itself? Looking at the manual, it sounds like you should use this (if you're not already).
"4:3 Letter Box : Select when you connect the player to a 4:3 TV screen. The player will display all content in its original aspect ratio. Content formatted in 16:9 will be displayed with black bars on the top and bottom."
posted by FreezBoy at 4:35 AM on January 15, 2012