Archived from groups: alt.video.ptv.tivo (
More info?)
In article <7JGYd.15124$4k2.12117@fe2.columbus.rr.com>, Axl wrote:
> MegaZone wrote:
>> Axl <nope@noway.com> shaped the electrons to say:
>>
>>>I am transferring some stuff to my laptop for tomorrow...and I noticed
>>>when I played one of the shows, the aspect ratio isnt 4:3 like standard
>>>TVs. It said the file properties are 480x480. A Perfectly square
>>>picture, making everything look squashed vertically.
>>>
>>>Anyone know whats up with this?
>>
>>
>> You need a different codec. Some codecs presume pixels must be
>> square, and you get that effect. There have been threads here and
>> TiVoCommunity.com about setting up a new codec.
>>
>> -MZ, RHCE #806199299900541, ex-CISSP #3762
>
> I downloaded the InterVideo DVD XPack codec or whatever that Tivo has
> listed on the site. I installed it, verified it's on there, and yet in
> windows media player, my picture is STILL square.
>
> This is frustrating. Any other thoughts?
It's still the codec (almost certainly). You can verify this by
within WMP, go to the Now Showing frame and right-click on the show.
Choose Properties and you should be given the codec that WMP is actually
using to play the show. My guess is that it's not an approved
one. You need to get WMP to actually use a good codec, not just make a
good codec available to it.
My understanding, and I would be glad to have someone correct me (or
verify this
), is that in the process of playing a .tivo file, the
player (WMP here) has to both code and decode the stream. There is a
special TiVo filter invoked by the player that initially decodes the
..tivo stream (gets rid of the TiVo encryption and decodes TiVo's
private codec), and then needs to put the raw stream in a standard
form to operate further on. So the player then has to choose a codec
(COde-DECode algorithm) to encode the stream which will then be once
again decoded at the very end.
Players for non-TiVo media normally just have to decode the stream,
which is easy since the stream tells you which codec was used.
Players can do that well as long as the codec is available to them.
Players evidently do a very poor job of choosing an appropriate codec
if they need to actually encode the stream. WMP seems particularly
bad; basically choosing the first one on its internal list.
Everybody's codec, and set of programs that use codecs, situation is
different, so I don't give advice on exactly what to do. You'll need
to remove (or make lower priority) your bad codecs. There's lots of
methods discussed on TiVocommunity. Good luck!
/www.megazone.org/> <URL:http
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