Video Converted with TivoDecode or DirectShow Dump is 2x as Tall

[hurricanedavid]

When I convert my .tivo files to .mpg with TivoDecode or DirectShow Dump, they end up to be the right width, but the height is about twice what it should be.

When I play it with VLC, I can change the aspect ratio to 4:3 and it looks fine, but the movement is weird.

I think if I could get it to come out in the right resolution natively, that movement problem would disappear.

And this happens whether the file is downloaded with Tivo Desktop or directly via the built-in web server.

Any suggestions?


Tivo Series 2 DT
Win XP Pro sp2

[Yoav]

When I convert my .tivo files to .mpg with TivoDecode or DirectShow Dump, they end up to be the right width, but the height is about twice what it should be.

When I play it with VLC, I can change the aspect ratio to 4:3 and it looks fine, but the movement is weird.


At quality settings less than 'high', the tivo starts using really odd resolutions like 350x480 and such, and knows that it needs to stretch the image to fill the screen. Since even VLC doesn't seem to 'know' what to do (you have to manually tell it to use 4:3) I would guess that the movie source doesn't have the necessary information to tell the computer what stretching to do.

Your easiest choice is probably to just tell the tivo to use a better quality encoding (like best). And I'm pretty sure everything will 'work fine'.

If you want to go advanced, a quick search on google for tools to 'edit aspect ratio of mpeg2' yielded: http://www.videohelp.com/tools/DVDPatcher. Note that this is probably messy.

[hurricanedavid]

It's good to know about that DVD Patcher, but yeah, I'll just settle with changing the aspect ratio manually and tolerating the weird effects.

[ggieseke]

I doubt that DVDPatcher would help. The decrypted files from tivodecode or DirectShow Dump already have the correct MPEG-2 aspect ratio field set, it's just that some codecs are too stupid to read it and stretch the picture appropriately.

Most commercial codecs work just fine with WMP and other purely DirectShow media players, but VLC uses its own internal codecs.