[MPlayer-users] Scaling and Cropping

[Reimar Döffinger]

On Sun, Aug 19, 2012 at 12:33:41PM -0700, Graham Lawrence wrote:
> I thank you both, Reimar and Alexander, for your help.  My apologies
> for being unable to describe the problem better, my ignorance of video
> technology is near total.  Let me try again without infusing any of my
> interpretations as to what happened.
> 
> Using full screen mode at all times:
> The original dvd presents on my 1920x1080 monitor as a centralized
> 720x480 image with surrounding black border.
> The first encode, movie.2, presents as a 720x352 image occupying the
> full width of the monitor, black borders top and bottom.  Objects are
> distorted, being wider than they should be relative to their height.

I think that means you are encoding incorrectly.
Either you need to add a scale filter to do the aspect scaling (not
such a good solution since it costs quality) or you must make sure
the proper aspect is encoded in the file, e.g. via -lavcopts autoaspect.