I just bought a JVC GZ-MC500U digital video camera, and all video I record in 16:9 mode (720x480 MPEG-2 .MOD files) plays back squashed horizonally to 4:3 in every player I've tried so far: PowerDVD, Windows Media Player 9 & 10, etc. How do I fix this? Is it a camera bug tagging the files incorrectly somehow, or a misconfigured player setting?

720 x 480 is essentially a 4:3 format and will play back at that ratio unless the player is specifically told that the picture is anamorphic. Once you find that option in your player settings, it _should_ play back unsqueezed in 16:9.

CS

So it's the rule rather than the exception for digital video to have non-square pixels?

It seems that the digital video camera are susceptible to the same format Babel that plagues still cameras; every manufacturer has their own flavor of marking video files, even if they use a standard codec. Samsung, in a pathetic attempt to force you to use their crappy video editor, fourCC codes their AVI files with SEDG instead of DIVX, meaning that their MPEG AVI files will only play with their supplied codec, which crashes CyberLink PowerDirector (a buggy piece of crap anyway) and makes Premiere Elements run slower than the DivX codec, which does a better job anyhow. My new JVC camera will record 4:3 or 16:9, but it outputs both as identically tagged 720x480 MPEGs. So I have to manually mark the files as being 16:9 after I import them into Premiere.

I'm really liking Premiere Elements: it has most of the functionality of Premiere and has not crashed yet. PowerDirector crashes on a regular basis; I'm going to try to get a refund. It's a complete waste of hard drive space.

please tell me how you changed the aspect ration in premiere. I will give you 1 million dollars. please please please i have been all over. I have a JVC hdd camera too and carry the same problem. PLEASE!!!

Doesn't PowerDVD have a force- aspect ratio setting? I know ZoomPlayer does, as do most players.

Import the clip, then right-click on it, and select interpret footage. The dialog that comes up has an aspect ratio selection option where you can set 16:9. You can select and set multiple clips at once with this process. You can send the check or money order here.