hey, i am trying to make an avi file of the dvd "a beautiful mind". on the cover it says the aspect is 1.85:1..

here is the command i am using:

(2nd pass command identical except vpass=2 obviously..)

the problem i am having is that the avi file is slightly to wide for the screen... it is exactly like the dvd, except without the black borders, and when playing the dvd when i try to resize it, it keeps the movie in proportions, whereas with my avi file i cannot resize it proportionally....

my guess is that i need to either use a "scale" paramater, or subtract from the first 2 values of the crop setting proportionally... basically i am unsure of what values to use though, and what exact path i should take to fix this problem..

any help would be awesome, thanks.. --c0ldshadow

you presumably know that mplayer can make use an additional aspect fields in the avi header to automatically scale on playback, but this is not a standard avi feature, so won't work in other apps. what you can do is use -vf crop=...,scale=720:-2 if memory serves right. the -2 auto scales the output based on the new aspect of the video stream after cropping, not just the 16/9 ratio etc... should do what you want, but ultimately it's discouraged to scale during encoding, as you always lose quality somewhere... and it's slower too. but as above... there's no formal way to store an arbitrary aspect in an avi header anyway.