preserving 720x480 in a compliant VCD?

[eschalon]

What I want to do is preserve the aspect and quality of 720x480 DVD quality and make a compliant VCD. I know you pretty much can't but is there a way to make compliant VCD that does not distort when asked to play in full screen mode? I have made a few compliant VCD's and of course they look great when viewed in a 320x280 or whatever window, no distortion at all, but I of course want to watch them in full screen mode and you get a fair amount of distortion when you do this. I have followed the Sefy's guide and made some good VCD's but I want a full screen DVD quality movie, is this possible? thanks,

[Truman]

VCD compliant resolution is only 352x240 NTSC and 352x288 PAL. You could make 720x480 XVCD or XSVCD, but you should use a very high bitrate. Probably the better choice is SVCD (480x480) or XVCD (480x480, 352x480). Which encoder do you use?

[Terry Hagerty]

Well, I don't make a compliant VCD, but I do make VCD or SVCD's in 720x480. It depends on whether your player will play them. I have an Apex AD1500 (cheapest one out there I think) and it will play ANY SVCD or VCD (I turn off standard compliance) I make with Nero with ANY kind of MPG or MPG2, the only thing it seems to require is that they are in the standard resolutions. IE: 352x240,480x480, or 720x480.

Any combination of the above has worked for me with a bitrate of up to about 4500 with no glitches or problems.

Just letting you know it can work on some players.

[eschalon]

I rip with smartripper and then use dvd2avi then load it all into TMPGenc to encode into the MPG-2 files, I use Nero 4.9 to burn and now am only watching them on my DVD-ROM in my computer. I was under the impression Nero would not burn them as a VCD unless they were in line with NTSC formats, that it would error out and not burn. I will experiment with it and when I get an actual DVD player for the tube will experiment further. I am looking at a Toshiba that runs about $160 and is compliant with all formats of disks and plays Mp3's and all I forgot the model number.. thanks, esc

[vitualis]

You cannot put 720x480 video onto a VCD or SVCD and have it as compliant.

VCD has a max. quality slightly better than VHS.

SVCD is about the same as SVHS.

When played on full screen on a TV, it should not look streched in anyway. If you do, then it would be because you've made an encoding error somewhere and specificed the wrong aspect ratio.

Regards.

[VTHobbes]

What you could do is use TMPGEnc to make you a new MPEG file with the ol' black bars on it. If you can use an SVCD, then it should still look decently good, and it won't be all stretched. To do this, go into Setting(bottom right) and select your source aspect ratio and how you want it to display (Full Screen keep aspect I think it is). You'll probably want 16:9 as your source aspect. Encode part of the file and see how it looks.