Hi Folks,

I've been using Dishrip, a Windows utility which pulls the MPEG-2/.mp2 recordings off of the Dishplayer (like Tivo for DishNetwork), so they can be burned to DVD (once you've put the DishPlayer hard drive into the Windows PC). This is a GREAT program because you get Dish Network quality at space of about 1GB/hour. I then transfer those files over to my eMac for authoring and burning. My problem is that Dish broadcasts in a 544 x 480 resolution for TV Shows and 600 x 480 for movies. This looks fine when playing the individual or muxed files, but when authoring (in Sizzle or FFmpegX, I'm forced to choose from Standard resolutions of 720 x 480 or 352 x 480 to author the disc image. This conflict in resolutions is (I think) what's causing me to get a TV picture that is stretched over 2/3rds of the screen only, leaving a black band and then the first 1/3 of the image again. When playing the disc in the computer it compensates and I get a normal picture, but my set-top DVD player can't compensate and I'm stick with that weird image. I can center it and fool around with the zooms but I always have distortion and a missing part of the image.

It would be silly and a waste of time for me to have to re-encode a file that's already in MPEG-2 just to get the right resolution. Do you have any ideas about how to do non-standard resolutions in authoring?

Any advice would be appreciated!

Regards,

Eq