Making a Widescreen Movie

[Diplomat]

OK I had Freddy got Fingered on DVD and and to watch on my PC I converted it to a Divx. When i converted it to Divx it was widescreen, but know my DVD is too scratched to play so i figured i would just Author it to a DVD and burn it. Well I did and when I was done I burned my VIDEO_TS folder onto a DVD-RW for testing and I started to play it and It come up as full screen but not true full screen but the wide screen stretched out to fit the screen . I used Ulead Movie Factory 2 to get the VIDEO_TS folder to burn. I was just wondering if there was a program that I can use to make my .vob files widescreen like Ifoedit or VOBEdit or another way I should go about this process. Any suggestions welcome. Thanks

[SaSi]

That reminds me of the problems I used to have.

A Wide screen movie can be more than one flavour. DVD provides for 4:3 aspect, where the 720x576 (PAL) resolution is displayed full screen, and the 16:9 aspect, where the movie is normally encoded at 720x576 with the 16:9 aspect flag set while authoring the DVD forcing the DVD Player to "resample" the movie into fewer scan lines when played-back on 4:3 TVs.

So the first catch (and probably where you got it wrong) is that while authoring you did not set the 16:9 option.

However, normal movies are not 16:9. Typical values include 2.35:1 which is the typical movie format these days. This is more like 21:9. If your DivX movie has no black letterbox borders but the frame is just the movie, you need to check the aspect ratio. If the frame dimensions are like 720 x 404 it means the movie is a 16:9 movie which you have modified to have a 1:1 aspect ratio, which is the proper way to view on a PC. You can either resample it to become 720 x 576 again and author as a 16:9 DVD, or letterbox it into a 720 x 576 frame (using VirtualDUB for example) before encoding. Tmpgenc allows you to do the letterboxing while encoding. You will need to letterbox the movie prior to authoring if your authoring s/w doesn't allow you to do 16:9 movies. (Which one are you using?)

To give another example, if your movie is 2.35:1 then the frame should be like 720 x 306 or so. Such movies need to be manually letterboxed. You need to add equal letterbox borders to the top and bottom and encode as 4:3. (Don't try to resize the frame into 16:9 mode as there are too few scan lines and you will only harm the image quality).

Hope the above helped a little.