Aspect Ratio Is Changed in Plex

Plex Players Streaming Devices
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Server Version#: 1.19.5.3112
Player Version#: 8.4.2.19372
nVIDIA Shield (2017) Version#: 8.0.2 (32.5.205.105)

I don’t know what might be causing this problem, so please forgive me if I am raising it in the wrong place. Several months ago, I bought The Complete PRC Michael Shayne Mystery Collection, which consists of five old films having an aspect ratio of 1.37:1 (roughly 4:3). When played in my blu-ray player, all five films have this aspect ratio. However, when played via Plex, all five films have an image that looks more like 3:4 (that is, tall and skinny). I re-ripped one of the films today using the latest version of MakeMKV, but the aspect ratio on Plex still is wrong. I haven’t seen this problem before when using Plex to view the older films in my collection. Is this a bug the distributor might have added to prevent copying to a server? Thanks.

Plex Media Server Logs_2020-08-02_15-01-18.zip (5.1 MB)

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Does it look wrong on both your Shield and in a web browser?

It’s unlikely to be copy protection. It’s more likely to be a difference in the aspect ratio that was encoded on the disk vs. what’s being used for playback.

It’s possible something was lost along the way. Or some of these collections-on-a-DVD are just built funky.

MakeMKV should be a reliable way to rip a movie. You didn’t encode, compress, or shrink the movie after using MakeMKV, right?

In Plex, while you’re looking at one of the films, can you go up to the “…” More menu, and choose Get Info, then View XML, and share that here?

There should be at least two lines with width, height, and aspect ratio. It would be nice to see the whole output, or at least those two lines.

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I don’t know how to view the movie using a browser, but it looks wrong on my computer, too. Here’s a screen shot of the data. The aspect ratio seems correct to me.

Screen Shot 2020-08-02 at 5.01.03 PM
Screen Shot 2020-08-02 at 5.01.03 PM943×530 217 KB

When I click on View XML, I can see only a blank screen. I saved whatever is there as a zip file. Is this what you need? Thanks.

18153.zip (5.0 KB)

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Yes, that had the XML in it, including the lines I was hoping for:

<Media id="20978" duration="4001097" bitrate="3297" width="720" height="480" aspectRatio="1.33" audioChannels="2" audioCodec="ac3" videoCodec="mpeg2video" videoResolution="480" container="mkv" videoFrameRate="NTSC" videoProfile="main">

<Stream id="59825" streamType="1" codec="mpeg2video" index="0" bitrate="3105" language="English" languageCode="eng" anamorphic="1" bitDepth="8" chromaLocation="left" chromaSubsampling="4:2:0" codedHeight="480" codedWidth="720" colorPrimaries="smpte170m" colorRange="tv" colorSpace="smpte170m" colorTrc="smpte170m" frameRate="29.970" height="480" level="8" pixelAspectRatio="8:9" profile="main" refFrames="1" requiredBandwidths="3374,3214,3144,3144,3144,3144,3144,3144" scanType="progressive" width="720" displayTitle="480p (MPEG2VIDEO)" extendedDisplayTitle="480p (MPEG2VIDEO)" />

The combination of aspectRatio="1.33" and pixelAspectRatio="8:9" is exactly what I would expect to see for a 4:3 show from a DVD.

Can you share what it looks like in the Plex app or on the Shield?

You might need somebody from Plex to help by looking at logs from one of those players.

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Here’s a screen shot from my computer:

Screen Shot 2020-08-02 at 7.25.23 PM
Screen Shot 2020-08-02 at 7.25.23 PM943×530 138 KB

Here, hopefully, is a file containing the log from the Plex app on my nVIDIA Shield TV:

logging.txt.zip (111.1 KB)

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I think those are the perfect logs. I’m unfamiliar with the Shield, but wrongly-stretched DVDs annoy me, so you have my interest. :slight_smile:

I don’t think Plex is doing anything wrong.

From a playback perspective, this looks how we would expect:

08-02 19:23:13.350  i: [Player] onDisplaySizeChanged(720x480 at 0x0)
08-02 19:23:13.352  i: [Player][DimensionsLayout] Resizing: 1440 x 1080

It’s stored as 720x480. It should be played back at 1.33:1, which is what 1440x1080 is. Those numbers look good.

But it’s clearly almost a square on screen.

Are there “black bars” encoded into the picture on the left and right sides? On the Mac, if you shrink the window down horizontally, can you get it to the left and right edges? Or does it start to squish vertically before you get there?

All NTSC DVDs are encoded as 720x480. That’s neither 4:3 nor 16:9. At playback they’re either stretched or squished to the appropriate ratio.

Incorrect horizontal squishing can happen when a 16:9 DVD is marked as 4:3 on disc. At playback it gets squished to 4:3 instead of stretched to 16:9.

This disc might have 4:3 content that was rendered into a 16:9 DVD, along with black borders on the sides. If it was then tagged as 4:3, it could be extra-squished, like this, at playback.

(Everything about that is insane but plausible. It shouldn’t be necessary to render video as 4:3-in-16:9 for DVD, but it’s not uncommon for Blu-ray. If it was rendered as 16:9, it should be labeled as 16:9 … but clearly it’s 4:3, so it’s easy to understand how that could happen. And a clever Blu-ray player or a press of “Zoom” and it would make it through QA. I’m making excuses for them.)

A quick solution would be to grab MKVToolNix. We can use it to change the ratio from 4:3 to 16:9, without re-encoding, so it plays back correctly.

MKVToolNix Downloads – Matroska tools for Linux/Unix and Windows

Drop your video on it, and then select the video track.

I expect the current Display width/height to be 640 x 480.
If so, change the Display width to 848. Save.

If they aren’t, please report back!

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Edit: Never mind. I see what you’re getting at. @Volts has it correct.

What you are seeing looks normal.

The movie has an aspect ratio of 1.37:1 (IMDB info), which is very close to the 1.33:1 (4:3) of pre-HD TV.

It is normal to see bars on left and right for such movies.

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Getcher eyeballs checked out, @FordGuy61. :stuck_out_tongue:

In that screenshot it’s a heck of a lot closer to 1:1, which is more like “Instagram” ratio.

Academy ratio 4 lyfe, y’all …

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Yep. I goofed.

1 Like
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I actually asked for the screenshot because I couldn’t bring myself to ask “are you just annoyed by black bars?” in the first place.

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If ya want to freak out a player - put anamorphic to use on HD material.

I’ll go ahead and carry my cross up spike hill and you guys can just nail me to it.
It’ll be easier that way.

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No HD here! My theory is that this DVD got scrambled at the factory when they were squishing so many movies onto it.

Heya Juice, we should go into business selling “anamorphic monocles”. Next year we can sell an upgrade to an HDR version.

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Let me recap the facts. All five movies play correctly when I use my Oppo blu-ray player, meaning that vertical black bars appear on my 4K TV, which is fine with me. When those movies are played via the Plex app on my nVIDIA Shield TV, however, those vertical black bars appear wider than normal.

New fact: The same picture-squeezing problem occurred this morning when I used the Plex app on my Apple TV 4K.

Do you still recommend using MKVToolNix? Thanks.

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It’s worth a try. You could make a backup of the file, or just undo the change if it doesn’t help.

If it doesn’t help, I’m going to hope you can share a sample of the file.

Note: Aspect ratio is stored in a few places on a DVD. Chances are good that your (nice) Blu-ray player is reading from the DVD & Menu structure. Once extracted, the information in the video stream itself is used. That could explain the differing behavior.

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Pictures! To try to explain what I think might be happening.

Here’s a nice 4:3 image:

image

Here’s the same 4:3 image, matted into 16:9. There are useless black bars on the side, sometimes called “pillarboxing” (the opposite of “letterboxing”) but the image itself hasn’t been stretched or squished.

image
image852×480 150 KB

If that was encoded onto a DVD, but incorrectly marked as still being 4:3, it would look like this when it was played back:

image

That reminds me a lot of your image, above.

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I was able to fix all five of those films using MKVToolNix. So, I used that software to try to fix two wide-screen films (on DVDs) that have black bars on all four sides. One film supposedly has an aspect ratio of 1.85:1. It still has black bars at the top and bottom, but looks better than having a small-sized movie on a 4K TV screen. The second film supposedly has an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. It still looks a bit too squeezed on the top and bottom, so I will have to compare its look with that of another film with that aspect ratio if I have one.

Thanks for all your help.

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Take aspect ratios listed on DVDs with a grain of salt. You’ll see movies listed as 1.85, but are actually 1.78, etc. Most will try to honor the OAR, but are still off just a bit.

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More DVD history!

I mentioned that DVDs are encoded as 720x480, and they’re stretched or squished into 4:3 or 16:9 at playback time.

Well, there was a time, before 16:9 TVs were common, that wide movies were matted into 4:3 on DVD. (It wasn’t until later that 16:9 formatted DVDs were introduced. Those sometimes have the word “Anamorphic” on the DVD.) I’m assuming your DVDs that do this are a bit older?

When every TV was 4:3, this worked OK. The proportions look right on a 4:3 TV:
image
That’s 2.4:1 in a 4:3 frame.

But you get this disaster if you play that on a 16:9 TV:

image
image852×480 98.2 KB

That’s 2.4:1 video in a 4:3 frame, played on a 16:9 TV.

Nothing is wrong here - this isn’t an “encoded width” problem. The 4:3 frame can’t be made any taller on screen without cropping, because of the black bars. They’re part of the video file.

The classic solution is to hit Zoom on your DVD player or in your TV. :slight_smile: Some Android devices DO include a Zoom function.

MKVToolnix can change the metadata associated with the file, but it can’t change the contents of the video. The cropping options in MKVToolnix are ignored by every player that I’m aware of. So the solution isn’t in MKVToolnix.

The digital solution would be to digitally crop out the black bars and reencode the file. You would be left with a file that had no black bars, and could be scaled to fit the maximum height or width of your screen.

If you want to do that, grab Handbrake.
https://handbrake.fr/downloads.php

Drop your MKV on it.
Choose preset General/Fast 480p30 for now.

Share a screenshot of the Dimensions tab, so we can verify cropping, storage and playback dimensions.
(We want cropping to take the black pixels off the top and bottom. It might take just a few off the edges, that’s fine too.)

Hit Preview and then Live Preview to make sure it looks right to you.

Check the Save As: location at the bottom. If you want you can hit Start to do a test.

(If this works we can talk about other settings.)

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Yes, while going through this exercise, I noticed that most of my post-1954 films have an aspect ratio of 1.78. I think that the DVDs and blu-rays show the aspect ratio of the theatrical release.

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Photograph 2 above shows what I was seeing when playing three of my movies. I replaced one of them with a blu-ray version, and your earlier suggestion for fixing the 4:3 problem probably fixed “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1955). I might watch it today to see how it looks.

Thanks for providing Handbrake instructions in your email. Software without instructions can be pretty dangerous.