Anamorphic video
Widescreen video stored with non-square pixels, as broadcast and DV-era sources are, meant to be stretched to 16:9 on display.
How it should play
What a broken player shows
What goes wrong
The pixel aspect is ignored and the picture is shown squeezed: everyone looks thin.
The file
- Container
- MP4, 6 s
- Size
- 4.3 MB
- Video
- H.264, 1440x1080, 30 fps
- Audio
- AAC, stereo, 48,000 Hz
- Expected
- plays correctly in any player
How it was verified
Built by the testsrc generator (gen v0.2) and verified with FFmpeg 7.1.5-0+deb13u1 and GStreamer 1.26.2 in snapshot 2026-11-02, before it was published: the file has the property this page describes, and decoding it gives the expected result.
With a token: the file, how exactly it was built, the full fact sheet, and the expected result the checker judges a player against.
Use it
# the public facts curl https://testsrc.com/v1/cases/edge/anamorphic-sar-4-3.mp4 # the full fact sheet and the file, with your token curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $TESTSRC_TOKEN" \ https://testsrc.com/v1/cases/edge/anamorphic-sar-4-3.mp4/facts curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $TESTSRC_TOKEN" -o anamorphic-sar-4-3.mp4 \ https://testsrc.com/v1/files/edge/anamorphic-sar-4-3.mp4 # play it through your player and check what it showed testsrc run --player libvlc edge/anamorphic-sar-4-3.mp4
See the API reference for tokens, quotas and snapshots.
testsrc is in early access. Free for open-source projects, $99/month per organisation for companies.
Get early accessMore on orientation and aspect
- Portrait video rotated by the display matrixMP4Players that ignore the flag show the video sideways, or squeezed into the wrong aspect.
4 more cases on this with a token.