[relaxxx]

I noticed this on my amv’s but I know why it’s done, and for a fairly good reason. Your common TV aspect is 4:3. your player screen is 3:4. Apparently there’s a way to encode the video rotated 90 degrees so you can watch full screen with proper aspect and that’s exactly what the SMV players do.

So if you want full screen video on a 3:4 screen, you must either crop the sides or squish the video. This is what I found when playing with the amv encoder: Mode 1 will squish the video horizontally to fit. Modes 0 and 2 crop the edges to fit and mode 3 zooms and crops right side.

Considering the screen size, cropping can be your friend, you may loose some of the video but what you do see is bigger than it would have been uncropped. I was using Virtual dub to resize and crop video even more to “zoom” in on the best part of the videos.