Did some research and got help from someone at the website i am trying to upload to. It looks like my .mov videos are 848×480, essentially natively 16:9. The videos from my dv camera are 720×480, which is an aspect ratio of 1.5, not the 1.78 required for 16:9. But when i render the video as an mpeg2 it assigns the aspect ratio as 16:9, windows media player recognizes this and plays it properly. The website i upload to (and it looks like the quicktime player) only recognize the physical aspect ratio, and as a result shows a squeezed image (ignoring the specified ratio of 16:9). That explains why my .mov videos display properly and the vids from my dv camera don’t.
Question, is there a way to render the 720×480 video with a physical aspect ratio of 16:9? That would force the video to display properly everywhere. Otherwise i am going to be stuck hoping that evertime i try to play the videos somewhere new it recognizes the specified aspect ratio.
Sorry for all the posts and thanks in advance,
Peter