We often rely on things like what the cover art says ("enhanced for widescreen TVs") or how the movie seems to display on a given DVD player / TV set combination, but I've never been happy with this this.

I've always wanted the ability to identify anamorphic discs as trivially as dual layered vs single layered discs. Now I think I've found a freeware tool for this.

MediaInvo, by Digi-metrics gives you the most elusive definitive factors all in one place.

It identifies the PAR (Pixel Aspect Ratio), which tells you if you're dealing with square (non-anamorphic) pixels, along with the Display Aspect Ratio. If you know the right formulas (I don't) you can use this info to determine effective resolutions for anamorphic PAL and NTSC discs, frame rates, bit rates, and so on.

This is very technical info, but it's nice to be able to answer a question about a disc without running around trying to play it on multiple devices.

BTW: There are other programs that provide this sort of info, (PAR), but I don't know which ones are free. MediaInfo was my choice since it's a SourceForge hosted project.

Exactly

Quoting lasitter:

Quote:
What you see on the screen is dependent upon the settings of the player.

That's why scotthm mentioned the "Normal Mode" (Means: All Zooming-functions disabled).

Zoom should be a banned setting anyhow.
I often find it quite amusing that people are not buying certain releases for not having the original Aspect Ratio while "enhancing" their viewing experience by zooming a 2.40:1 picture to 1.78:1 just because they have a 16:9 screen and don't like the black bars.

Quoting lasitter:

Quote:
It could all be a moot point at present as the same people that don't understand their player settings wouldn't understand the output of MediaInfo.

People who don't understand the stretch/zoom settings for their television probably shouldn't be contributing technical data in Profiler.

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ateo357: The tool I mention is not simple enough, but the information it provides could give a one-click answer to the question "Is this Anamorphic?"

Of course, someone has yet to write this one click plugin / application ...

"Automatic" software is just reading the IFO file.

I've seen plenty of discs that are incorrect... "Anamorphic" in the IFO file, but are in fact letterboxed, and get stretched all wrong if a DVD player doesn't offer user override control of the scaling (or a separate scaler is used).

So, if you want to be as accurate as possible, you should always check. VLC Player works fine for this. But there's no way to do it accurately without putting eyes on the video itself and checking.

Quoting scotthm:

Quote:
I contribute to my own database (except for the occasional cover contribution) and let the rest of you work the online out for yourselves.

That really does suck that the situation has devolved to this. I don't blame you at all though, given the current state of things.

Quoting Grendell:

Quote:
"Automatic" software is just reading the IFO file.

I think you have to check the .VOB files ...