Tutorial by Examples

This is a screenshot of a video playing. You see a normal 16:9 video like you would expect to see in any modern video solution. This - the aspect ratio that the viewer sees - is what is called the display aspect ratio or DAR. From the illustrated parameters, we see that DAR = 1280:720 = 16:9 = 1....

Internally, all videos are a just series of pictures. Let's take a look at one such picture. That looks odd, right? Indeed. The pictures that make up a video may have an aspect ratio that are different from the DAR, most often for algorithmic reasons (e.g. only sizes that are a multiple of 16 can...

As the picture aspect ratio example indicates, videos are series of pictures that do not necessarily have the same aspect ratio as the final result to be displayed to the user. So how do you get from those stretched pictures to the normally displayed output? You need a stretching factor! This stret...

This is another name for sample aspect ratio and should be avoided, as the natural acronym (PAR) conflicts with picture aspect ratio.