Hi

I upgrading to the latest xvid encoder/decoder a little while back. I have 1 home old recording which was not recorded very well and the picture is a little stretched, i.e. everyone looks longer and slimmer

Anyway, before I upgraded, I was able to squash the image a little using the number keys using media player classic. But now, after the upgrade, I can no longer do that?

Does anyone know how I can get this function back?

Thanks

I've also had this problem before. IIRC Media Player Classic's stretching functionality depends on the decoder; some decoders don't allow you to break the aspect ratio.

The XviD decoder should be fine, but you should check MPC's right click -> Filters menu to see whether the XviD decoder really kicks in. When I installed DX9, Visual Studio or something like that, a filter called "Microsoft AVI Decompressor" hijacked my playback and I couldn't resize the image vertically anymore. The solution was to lower the MS filter's priority with Graphedit or Radlight Filter Manager.

Also check that your MPC is configured to use overlay or VMR9 mixer. They work a lot better than the "Old Renderer" that usually kicks in.

thanks for the reply

I dont have dx9 but do have visual studio .net

I downloaded Radlight Filter Manager and cant seem to find that microsoft filter, will it be in the directx filter section?

thanks again

The problematic filter is DirectShow -> AVI Decompressor to be exact. But that's not necessarily the problem in your case.

You need to check which filters get used when playing the clip. This can be done with MPC's right-click context menu. If the filter chain contains some suspicious items or doesn't have XviD decoder at all, some rogue filter might have hijacked your playback. That's assuming your video is MPEG-4 to begin with.

You also might want to try ffdshow, since it definitely works properly.

niktheblak,

Thank you so much

I can now watch my old home movies stretch free

I just re-enabled ffdshow with xvid and it worked.

Thanks again!

A little off topic, but I have some incredibly narrow MPEG2 movies, which I could do with breaking the aspect ratio on... But I cant do it. Any easy way round that?

This will work if your clips are xvid and divx, but am not sure about all the other formats.

Thanks to niktheblak I can again dynamically adjust the video to my needs width and height.

All you need is media player classic and ffdshow. Install ffdshow and allow it to control your xvid or divx files. This will then let you use media player classics stretching/shrinking function.

Media Player Classic can decode MPEG-2 files. Using the built-in MPEG-2 decoder, you should have no problems stretching the picture any way you want to. Also Zoom Player can stretch the picture with pretty much any MPEG-2 decoder (Cyberlink, InterVideo etc).

AFAIK ffdshow's MPEG-2 decoding is still broken.