weird aspect ratio problems with dvd playback

[dalroth]

I'm having some odd problems with DVD playback and aspect ratios. I've tried a number of different variations of decoder settings, and aspect ratio settings, but I still keep getting this problem, and it's very odd.

If I play a wide screen movie (say 16:9) it will play fine, sometimes. Other times, it will play in what looks like a 4:3 window, however it's only playing a stretched portion of the left side of the screen and the right side is cropped off!

(imagine the word CENTER, and only being able to see CENT and the er is missing).

This is driving me crazy. The most annoying thing is it will switch from a perfect 16:9 rendering to this weird 4:3 rendering right in the middle of a movie stream! In fact, earlier this evening it switched right in the middle of the opening credits of the movie we were trying to watch.

If I open up the movie in Media Player Classic, it plays flawlessly.

Any ideas what my problem could be? I've tried the NVIDIA decoder, the SageTV decoder, all the aspect ratio settings, and I typically don't use overlay and I never use VMR9 (my machine just can't seem to handle it).

Thanks,
Bryan

[dalroth]

In case anybody runs into the same problem I was having, I installed PowerDVD 8 tonight and configured SageTV to use the PowerDVD codecs. Not only did my problem go away, but SageTV works 1000x better across the board.

Before I installed PowerDVD, my system was borderline unusable.

[John@TunerUK]

I've had this same thing happen on rare occasions on one of my clients, but never the server. I'm using an intervideo decoder on both. Usually stopping the dvd and restarting it fixes the problem.

[willieb]

This thread is a little old, but I have been battling this problem for a few months. I have has Sage for a couple years and never saw this problem, but I reinstalled windows and started with fresh installs of everything a few months ago and I have had this problem ever since. Mine is a tiny bit different in that I get cropping on both sides. The movie is being shown in 16:9, but both sides are being cropped to 4:3. To use the example above, I would see ENTE on my screen. If I stop the dvd and restart, it will fix it. Sometimes it takes 4 or 5 times though, so it is pretty annoying. I don't want to have to buy a new DVD program just to fix this, so any thoughts would be appreciated...

[sleeeves]

Same thing happening with mine lately too. This is after a Windows XP re-install and fresh Sage installation. I've tried many decoder combinations, nothing makes the DVD aspect ratio correct from the get-go. Bringing up the info screen fixes it after a few attempts but that is not a real fix. I'm still searching through the forums for any suggestions, but this was the first post that matched my issue.

Currently Windows XP Pro, Sage 6.5.18 RC downloaded 7/1/2009. This started happening with 6.5.13 and I hoped going to .18 would magically fix it, but nope.