Video with inconsistent exposed / rendered image sizes I have an interlaced video with MTS file format, which was captured using a HD camera.
When I play it using VLC, it is displayed at resolution 1920x1080 and if I take a snapshot with VLC, the saved image also has a resolution of 1920x1080. I tried playing the video with the Windows Media Player, and the video is also rendered at a resolution of 1920x1080.

However, in VLC, when I select Tools > Codecs information I get the following :

Type: Video
Id original: 4113
Codec: H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part10) (h264)
Resolution: 1440x1080
Framerate: 25
Decoded format: Planar 4:2:0 YUV


(there also are an audio stream and a subtitle stream, which I am not interested in).

So the exposed resolution seems to be 1440x1080 but when rendered the video is 1920x1080.

Anyway, my true problem comes from the fact that I need to extract the frames from the video to perform some Image Processing. I do that using ffmpeg, which extracts frames at the resolution of 1440x1080, but then the extracted images seem distorted (i.e. compressed horizontally), which causes errors for the Image Processing I am doing.

Any idea why VLC, Windows Media Player, Power DVD manages to render the video correctly, whereas ffmpeg fails to extract the frames at the correct resolution ? And why is the video rendered at 1920x1080 if the exposed codec resolution is 1440x1080 ?
HDV camera, right? It's not untypical for cameras to claim higher resolution than they actually scan. In such cases you have to look at the different aspect ratios involved: pixel, frame, display, sample. Here's a post that discusses this, or google "HDV aspect ratio". And here's a link to the spec from the HDV consortium.

It's essentially anamorphic. The ffmpeg or avconv docs should show how to extract and expand to 1920 in one step.