ITauthor

My video camera records in 16:9, which has taken over from 4:3 as the standard aspect ratio. The trouble is, when I play those video in Windows Media Player, or try and edit them in something like Windows Movie Maker, they get displayed as 4:3. If I go and manually change the aspect ratio in the application, all that does is give me black bars right and left of the picture.

Searching for a solution, I found an explanation of what was happening, plus a very nice little free fixer tool here:

http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7594_102-0.html?threadID=308647

All Panasonic,JVC and Canon mpeg2 camcorders that generate MOD files on either HDD or SD-card do not set the widescreen flag in the mpeg2 sequence headers in 16:9 mode. Instead they leave it as 4:3 and put the information, whether 16:9 or 4:3 was used, inside the corresponding MOI file.
        Unfortunately most video player or editing software do not evaluate the content of the MOI file and therefore the video remains in 4:3.
        I have written a small tool sdcopy that can automatically correct the 16:9 flag of multiple MOD files. In addition, it can automatically copy all found MOD files(of all subfolders) into a single target folder. Sdcopy does not modify or decrease the video quality, it just patches the headers.
        You can download sdcopy from here, its freeware:
        http://zyvid.com/smf/index.php?action=dlattach;topic=280.0;id=218

 
I’ve used SDcopy and it did exactly what I wanted: produced videos that opened up in Media Player in 16:9 and, in the process, gave the files much more meaningful file names.