Similar to this post, I've sent some video tapes off to be digitized. In this case, they are mini-DV tapes which should be 720x480 resolution (more or less). The resulting MP4 files do claim to be 720x480 but the images don't look right. I uploaded one such movie here, it's a little hard to tell but even for dancers they aren't shaped quite like that. The video makes them look more like elves than humans, which is probably better than looking like hobbits, but still not right. If I play this MP4 using the standard Windows player, pause it, and grab a screenshot, the resulting image is 1118x832 which is an aspect ratio of 1.34 which explains the elvishness. But why?

I was not familiar with the concept of pixel aspect ratio until I started reading up on DV format but I'm guessing that's what's happening here. The Wikipedia page on DV says there are "different pixel aspect ratios for fullscreen and widescreen video" but doesn't say what those values are.

Since Windows is stretching this video when it plays it, it makes me think that there is a pixel aspect ratio embedded in the MP4 file, but the standard Windows "Show Properties" doesn't display it. Or maybe Windows always plays videos using a 1.33 pixel aspect ratio or something?

What I'm thinking, is that since DV is recorded with 480 scan lines, and the resulting image is 480 pixels high, they don't need to re-digitize the video. I could drop the MP4 into my video editing software (Sony's Vegas Movie Studio) and hit it with a "compress vertically" deform, but it seems like that's going to end up blurring the video. I have all the right pixels, it's just that my pixels aren't the right shape (right?) Is the pixel aspect ratio stored in this MP4 file in a place where I could adjust it and get my video to look right?