Aspect ratio functionality seems to be broken

[khoschi]

With the old interface (up to 1.5.1 i believe) it was possible to change the aspect ratio by unticking a checkbox and disable anamorphic output storage. The output had a different storage/displaysize and PAR 1x1.

Anyway, it was possible to crop a few pixels of scanning errros, letterbox lines etc. and give the finshed transcode the exact same dimensions of the input (which is, actually, a bit of upscale), while keeping PAR 1x1.

All recent version enforce the aspect ratio, as width and height are always linked - you can unlink both only by enabling anamorphic storage, which then will deliver the exact same display ratio of the input, as the PAR is manipulated.

Please give us a chance to disable this link of width and height, so we can change from anamorphic to native ratio.

For clarity, to my understanding we have the following ratios:

1. Input storage ratio - the size of the stored picture (and the resulting ratio). This is the native picture.
2. Input display ratio - the size/ratio which the stored picture should be showed (can be adjusted as parameter in mkvtoolnix. If adjusted, the displaying software has to change the stored picture to the desired ratio while displaying)
3. Input pixel ratio - this is the PAR, pixel aspect ratio. Its adjusted to connect the native to the display size. So a stored 200x100 picture with PAR 1x2 is displayed at 200x200, as each of the 100 vertical pixels is showed at 2 pixels height (storage ratio is 2:1, display ratio is 1:1.)
   And the same goes for the output.

Is this an issue, or am I completly wrong ind using recent version? Or are there any reasons why this should not be possible?

[khoschi]

So I finally figured out what the problem is: a bug, combined with confusion and bad layout.

So load a video (anamorphic or not), then

1. adjust cropping and letterbox if desired
2. set resolution and scaling to:
   limit: bigger than desired final size
   anamorph: none
   Optimal size disable
   upscale enable
   final size (bottom) untick automatic display size

Now you can enter scaled heigth first, and finaly adjust width with the display size below, as scaled width is linked to this setting.
Note that pixelformat PAR remains at 1x1.

The resulting video will have a changed aspect ratio in the stored frame, while it is not anamorphic (PAR is 1x1).
If you use x265 as codec it will show the "input-res=" in mediainfo as your setting.

The bug: the scaled values shoul not be locked together (the checkbox "Keep aspect ratio" has been removed und can't be disabled anymore).
The confusion: the scaled values are the ones that go to the input side while encoding, while the PAR values are applied to the output and should be connected to the display size below.