I’ve never had a lot of luck with using handbrake to make a video resolution larger than original (That isn’t what it’s for, so not hard to understand it not working well at it). You can use avidemux to resize bigger, but there are few practical reasons to do that, it will generally only make your file larger (data footprint wise). Even a phone can “project” to a larger screen size from a lower resolution source quite well.
And, it looks to me as if your source is 4:3, not 16:9. 4:3 is TV aspect ratio back in the day (not a widescreen format). Making it 16:9 you’d have to stretch it (also not something you want to do in handbrake) which just looks like a mess, or remove from top, bottom, or a little of each… also not horribly desirable. I just live with the pillars on old shows and let the device center it on the screen and stretch to fit while maintaining aspect ratio, which generally is default behavior. Making 4:3 - 16:9 just isn’t something that you really want to do, it either looks stretched side to side (cuz it is) or you’re taking out a significant amount of visual data.
If I absolutely had to have that 4:3 (rather than the 16:15 handbrake is showing; it’s numbers always get weird, imo, if any black is removed around the edges) on the finished product, I would do one of two things.
- Don’t let handbrake autotrim the black from the borders of the original, and live with there being black border as data in the file where every time I watch it having it not quite fill the screen top to bottom and possibly the black of the data not match the black displayed by the device for no data. Or,
- Run it through avidemux at as much quality as I could stand. Remove the black from around the borders and resize it back to 720*576 making sure that the 4:3 PAR gets retained (which can be a bit less obvious to find in avidemux, but if you preview your filter chain first you’ll figure it out, with little effort). This will change the “actual” aspect ratio of what you see (marginally) but it will make the numbers prettier in handbrake and when you look at it in mediainfo etc. Then run that through handbrake at the quality you want for the finished product. (This is the only time I would make a file higher resolution: to make up for what I’ve removed. But I really don’t recommend it. Devices don’t care how much they stretch a video to fit, 1%, 800%, it seems fairly trivial compared to actually decoding the stream.)
I’ve done it all 3 ways, and in the end, not getting twisted up about the aspect ratio numbers is more productive. If it looks like the original when it plays in VLC (or whatever you preview with) then it will display just fine on whatever device you play it on as long as you have the stream/file formats and bitrates right for the device. If it looks stretched, skewed, or otherwise messed up in VLC then you probably want to take another swing at it. When in doubt, play the original side by side what you encode. If they look the same height/width wise (discounting the black borders) you’ve got it licked.
Finally, are you sticking with ac-3 audio? I only ask because I have several devices that won’t direct stream play ac-3. May not be a concern for you now, and certainly not something you can’t fix later, but… yeah.
Sorry for jumping in, JuiceWSA. Just trying to help. You’re more than welcome to correct me, especially if I’m missing some other point here.
EDIT: BTW, the magic number for 4:3 PAL is in fact 768, so either of those encodes, auto or loose should be correct.
