Do video players automatically force 16:9 to 4:3 until you manually change the aspect to 16:9. This guy tells me this clip is widescreen, and i said "are you sure?" and he goes "of course im sure" but when I open it up in any media player it is 4:3. The problem there is the video im making looks terrible in 4:3 and 16:9 makes it look right. But if it gets forced to 4:3 there's a problem cause everybody is gonna watch it that way and it looks weird and this bothers me.

So is it true or what?

No, if the video has been encoded as 16:9 (with a pixel aspect ratio to match) then both standalone players and software players should switch.

How have you encoded your video? I'm betting this could be the source of your problem. Additionally, how is the person with the problem viewing the video, and do you have the same problem?

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well, i have the top and the bottom cropped out to hide words. I think when I viewed an encoded video with the same cropping that it stretched the viewable video into 4:3, like the crop didnt even exist, kind of eliminating the fake 16:9. Im not 100% but im pretty sure thats what it did. So i think thats what's makin my video weird. It makes everything look, skinnier but taller and it really stands out.

I want to put the video in 16:9, but not just 16:9 with black bars, 16:9 with no bars at all. Havent figured out how to turn my movie in 16:9 yet, much less get rid of black bars.