Overscan on DVD played back on a computer

[maeks84]

Hello all,
I've been working on converting VHS to DVD. When I capture a tape, it captures the video errors (like black bars, tracking issues, etc) on the sides, top, and bottom of the resulting video. I know that this is usually hidden due to overscan when played back on a television.

But what about when playing back the DVD on a computer with a program like VLC? When I do play it, the errors in the video are visible. I'm wondering what the best way to fix this would be? Is there someway to make the DVD tell the computer to hide the edges when authoring or would putting black bars in the video before burning be a good idea?

Thanks,
Matthew

[Baldrick]

Nope. The only way is to crop the video and author to a new DVD-Video.

[JohnnyMalaria]

VLC has a "Video Crop Filter" designed for this very purpose but I'm buggered if I can get it to work with either the GUI or the command line...

[maeks84]

Well shucks, I guess that's one more step added to the process. I think I'll just add black bars instead of cropping though. (Unless someone knows something I don't...) 10 or so pixel wide of black bars won't hurt much on the computer and will still keep the TV showing as much as possible.

For the VLC, I don't think that would be very practical to be doing that each time one of the discs was played back. The only cropping options I see in VLC (in Mac OS X) are for cropping to a certain ratio instead of cutting x off of the sides anyway. Probably missing something.

Thanks again for the quick help,
Matthew

[JohnnyMalaria]

According to the VLC documentation (which I find rather poor) you can define a rectangular region to crop to using the parameters <width> x <height> + <left offset> + <top offset>.

As I said, I couldn't get it to work though(!) Maybe someone else can explain why or how to do it.

If you can make it work, you can set it to be a default behavior.

[2Bdecided]

Media Player Classic has a nice arbitrary zoom feature, but that's not much use to you on a Mac!

Many people do just blank the garbage out of VHS captures.

It is a bad idea to crop and/or resize: you must use a DVD compliant size (the full res options are 704 or 720 by 480 for "NTSC"; 704 or 720 for "PAL"), and increasing the "clean" video signal to fill that size will reduce the quality, push more content into the overscan on a normal TV, and potentially wreck the interlacing. Black bars and no resize are the way to go!

Cheers,
David.

[jagabo]

In VLC you have to set the crop values, and enable the crop filter one step back. It's not practical to set it up every time you need it. Some dedicated DVD player software has overscan options.





If you leave out the last two arguments it centers the crop.