Not sure if this has come up before but I've a question about playing PAL 4:3 DVD's on a widescreen TV.

Been watching a few old UK TV series recently and noticed my TV displays the image in 720x576 (1:25) rather than (1:33). This is clearly because I have the TV set to 'Full Pixel' mode but none of the other screen options are able to force 4:3

My question is, should PAL DVD's look this way or are the effectively being vertically stretched by the widescreen TV?

How do you play those DVDs? Using an actual DVD player? Or are they dematerialised? If I play my old PAL DVDs of Seinfeld on my old Blu-ray player, I see them in 1.33:1 as they should.

(2020-11-14, 05:48 PM)alexpeden2000 Wrote: Not sure if this has come up before but I've a question about playing PAL 4:3 DVD's on a widescreen TV.

Been watching a few old UK TV series recently and noticed my TV displays the image in 720x576 (1:25) rather than (1:33). This is clearly because I have the TV set to 'Full Pixel' mode but none of the other screen options are able to force 4:3

My question is, should PAL DVD's look this way or are the effectively being vertically stretched by the widescreen TV?

The second one. Or to be somewhat more precise, they're not so much being vertically stretched, but are *not* being horizontally stretched when they should be. Pixel aspect ratio should, as far as I can tell, either be 59:54 or 12:11 depending on who you talk to. (I think 59:54 is actually more correct but apparently it's common for digital software to use 12:11 because it's simpler, so that probably means there are a bunch of 12:11 DVDs.)

In other words, for some reason the display is rendering them as square 1:1 pixels when they're not. @Beber might be onto something with asking about the specific playback chain; if they've been demuxed or something, they might have a -SAR flag that's being ignored by your player/AVR/TV, or they might not even have that. A DVD player should know to display a properly authored disc with non-square pixels though.

A way you can display dematerialised files from DVDs in 1.33:1 would be to stretch those horizontally to full 16/9 in whatever player you use, and switch your TV to 4/3 mode to squeeze them back to proper proportions.

(2020-11-14, 05:55 PM)pipefan413 Wrote: The second one. Or to be somewhat more precise, they're not so much being vertically stretched, but are *not* being horizontally stretched when they should be.

Thanks for confirming, I thought this must be the case but couldn't find anything online.

(2020-11-14, 06:11 PM)Beber Wrote: A way you can display dematerialised files from DVDs in 1.33:1 would be to stretch those horizontally to full 16/9 in whatever player you use, and switch your TV to 4/3 mode to squeeze them back to proper proportions.

Using a Blu-ray player so will give this a try, much appreciated!