I have searched the forums as best as I could and can't seem to find the answer to this. How do you fugure out the actual aspect ratio of a movie? I know that sometimes the boxes are incorrect and IMDb isn't reliable. I have found a few programs that don't quite do the job. Someone here has been changing aspect rations, I think based on measurements from their screen. Is there a web site that will tell you, accurately, what any specific movies true aspect ratio is? TIA  
MWR

The best advice I can offer is, reeder is this. Determining what the theatrical OAR can be difficult.  There are variety of tools which can be used to determine the On Screen AR. However, I like Patsa urge caution. We know what the various industry standards are and recognize that in measuring you might be off a few pixels and it takes surprisingly few pixels in error to throw of the AR significantly. So look to your measurement against the industry standards. I would not, however try and differ with printed AR's of 2.35, 2.39 or 2.40, they are simply too close together, now if you have a printed 2.40 and a measured result in the neighborhood of 1.85 obviously the box is probably very wrong. And don't try and use a non-standard like say 2.15, it doesn't exist, anybody that would provide such a measurement I would highly suspicious of.

Just be careful.

Skip

Use a program like PowerDVD to display the movie on your computer screen and then use this tool to calculate the AR.
For example a picture of 800 pixels wide / 600 pixels high has an aspect ratio of 1.33:1

Go by the Rules... if the box says X:1 then, unless you can prove the box is wrong (and I would agree with Skip, significantly wrong) then go with what the box says.

This is actually pretty common, reeder. However be careful as well. The difference between 1.78 and 1,85 is very slight and amounts to a tin black band top and bottom that can sometimes be easily missed. Then there are the amusing ocassions when a director will decide to re-frame a 2.35 to 1.78, which always causes howls among the purists, sometimes this done by mistake. If I recall Lord of War was allegedly released in 2.35 AR, only to be discovered that despite the what the box said, it had been reframed to 1.78, caused themselves all kinds of trouble.

Skip

Quoting Patsa:

Quote:
The difference between 1.78 and 1.85 is easy to spot though, unlike say 2.35 and 2.40. If your display shows all pixels that is, sometimes they will crop off the sides due to overscan.

Not always; as you say if your TV has some overscan it could show 1.78 and 1.85 as both totally finning the screen... actually I think mine does!

Quoting ya_shin:

Quote:
Quoting Voltaire53:

Quote:
Not always; as you say if your TV has some overscan it could show 1.78 and 1.85 as both totally finning the screen... actually I think mine does!

Mine does too; and I am not really happy with that somehow.

1.78:1 films were completely filling the screen on my 4:3 bedroom set. It wasn't until I changed the aspect ratio setting on the dvd player to 4:3 instead of the 16 x 9 setting it was on that it corrected itself and I got the black bars bacl on the top and bottom. Something to look into.