Weird problem with default aspet ratio...

I recently picked up a bootleg disc containing about 3 hours worth of the Japanese program Chibira-kun. It's from 1970 so should obviously have a 4:3 aspect ratio -


But my DVD player will only recognize it as 16:9 -


And VLC plays the default at whatever this is, 0.733:1?


I know that I can just set the AR playback on VLC, but I was considering sharing it with friends and wanted to make sure that it automatically plays in the correct frame.

I did a little bit of reading on how to do this and grabbed DVDPatcher to try it out, but the program was seeing the files as 4:3 already. I used a "What Is My DVD?" tool here and got the same result -

VTS_01 specifications
Attributes: MPEG-2 352x480 (NTSC) (4:3)
# of title play maps: 1
Number of PGCs: 1
Longest Program Chain #: 1

I used VLC to record a small bit of video from the disc and the snippet had the same weird default ratio of taller than wide.

Can anyone explain to me what's going on with the floating ratio and maybe how I can fix it? Unfortunately I don't have the funds to buy any software so I'd need to perform the fix(es) with freeware.

Also, is there an easy way to reset and customize chapter breaks? The disc is menu-less and broken into three title set of 1h6m each. Between those there are only 11 chapters, but each title set is actually comprised of six 11 minute episodes and I'd like to be able to easily skip from one to the next.

Any direct help or even pointing me to the right old thread(s) would be greatly appreciated.