DishRip Authoring - Resolution/Aspect Ratio Problem

[Equus]

Hi Folks,

I'm on a mac, but am posting here to get some general concepts about this problem I'm having. 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. 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, 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

[gNOMEintheRedHat]

I don't know about the DishPlayer software, but the extraction tools for the DirecTV Tivo will patch the headers of the MPEG stream so that the DVD Authoring programs see it as 720x480.

You can check the code your self, as it is open sourced.

find the link HERE

gNOME...

[wulf109]

DVD works with a standard set of resolutions. Others won't display normally. Try a program "IFOEDIT 0.95",it has an author mode and will create a VIDEO_TS diectory from m2v and mpa files. It makes no checks for DVD compliance and may solve your problem.

[spiderman2k1]

I just use a Dazzle 2 capture card hook up the cable's record and burn my DVD's. whenI cap at high bitrate's you can not tell that it's not the dish http://www.shopharmony.com/ the berst price's but go to www.dazzlegeek.com to see if it will work on a mother board you have. i know your a MAC dude but if you can get a oh ok PC recording to SVCD and editting with MPEG2VCR is so fast. I record ton's of show's for dish and directtv and i find this way the best as with tivo you have to pay ten buck'sa month does dish charge for there tivo's sevice's?

[Equus]

Well the whole point is not to have to re-encode the Dish files since they're already in MPEG-2. I have a good capture device, but I wouldn't use it for this, that would just double the time. I would just send the extracted files back through the encoder with the right resolution. But I'm hoping not to have to do that.