TiVo Video Extraction and the 4:3 problem

As some of you will know, I regularly “rip” TV shows that have been recorded by my TiVo so I can archive them to DVD. This has been a pretty hit and miss affair over the years, until fairly recently when I stumbled across a way to 100% reliably get the data off the TiVo. Once on a PC though I encountered a new challenge – the 4:3 problem.

For some reason the MPEG2 stream that I extract from the TiVo via TyTools is tagged with the 4:3 aspect ratio – regardless of the true ratio of the source. This means that when I create a DVD of widescreen content it tends to get squished into the middle of the screen unless the TV/DVD player is intelligent enough to anamorphically stretch the video.

The aspect ratio is stored in the MPEG stream, sometimes in just a header but more often striped throughout the program stream. I’ve tried various tools over the years that attempt to “patch” the stream to fix the aspect ratio, but they’ve all had their problems. Some need to decode and recompress the entire file in order to achieve the goal – something that can take upwards of 4 hours for a 2.5Gb file. Others try to patch the aspect ratio flag without altering the rest of the file, this often resulted in a file with audio and video wildly out of sync – intolerable!

So it’s with some relief that I come across the wonderful bit of software VideoReDo, The Fast Non-Linear MPEG2 Editor. It does exactly what it says on the tin; editing MPEG1 and MPEG2 streams with no fuss, but more importantly making the aspect ratio an option when saving the video. It can fix the ratio on a 2Gb file in a little under 5 minutes. Perfect!

I’ve just created a valid MPEG2 stream of tonights Derren Brown special – Messiah – which if you missed it will be repeated on E4 next Wednesday – recommended viewing for all critical thinkers, and while I think about it, required viewing for all of a more credulous nature!

Categories: Software, TV