black bars are not the right shade of black?

[vonzippa]

I have converted/encoded a DivX to a DVD and everything is perfect except for the letterbox around my 2.35:1 film area. This particular DVD that I'm having trouble with has been authored as 16:9 because it is a widescreen film. The actual film occupies 720x360 pixels with the standard 60 lines of black on the top and bottom to fill up the rest of the 16:9 area on the screen. My problem is that the letterbox around my movie does not match the black boxes that the DVD player places above and below the movie. The letterbox on my movie is like a pure black whereas the top and bottom of the screen are a lighter shade of black, which almost looks gray in contrast to how black my letterbox is. I have played commercial 2.35:1 DVDs on this same player and the letterbox matches the rest of the border perfectly so it's obviously something I've done wrong. When I did some processing on this film before encoding it I created the letterbox with pure black (#000000 color code). Was it incorrect to use that dark of a black? Is there a specific color code that would match the rest of the border better? Has anyone else ever had this problem, or know how to correct it? Also, I'm not certain if this could have anything to do with it, but when I encoded the film to MPEG-2, I enabled the 'Output YUV data as basic YCbCr' option in TMPGEnc and I was thinking that perhaps that could have caused it. If that particular option is the cause of this then is there a way to undo that without re-encoding the m2v all over again?

[FulciLives]

When you create a Divx from a DVD it is customary to use DVD2AVI to create a D2V project file and demux your audio from the RIPPED VOB files.

If you use TMPGEnc as your encoder then you should pick RGB color space (not YUV/YUY2) and pick PC SCALE (not TV SCALE).

This should now encode correctly in TMPGEnc and give you a newly encoded file that matches the original (black should match).

In this set-up you would NOT checkmark the "YUV data as basic YCbCr" option.

If you use CINEMA CRAFT ENCODER aka CCE then you want to do the opposite. You would select YUV/YUY2 color space and TV SCALE.

Sorry but there is no way to "fix" this error otherthan to re-encode. Of course now that you know how to do it properly you could just leave it. It ain't the end of the world. But yes I know it can look a bit distracting and truth be told the blacks within the image are probably off as well so you might want to consider re-doing it.

This problem basically boils down to changing your Luminance from 0-255 to 16-235 or vice versa etc.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[johns0]

You havent done anything wrong,i`ve seen dvds made this way and sometimes the lighter shade of border turns back into the picture at some point,might be a way mpaa is trying to screw up encoding in case a program covers the shaded border with black.

[andie41]

This is very interesting and unfortunately I can't really help you. I have never encoded a 16:9 video so I am a little unclear as to what you added, but from my tests, setting black to 0.0.0 and selecting "output YUV ..." is the way to go. I am wondering if the DIVX was encoded with an elevated black level and then when played in the DVD, the black gets bumped up again and produces grey.

I looked at the black letterbox on a commercial DVD, captured a frame and checked the RGB values, and the black borders are 0.0.0., but when played in the standalone DVD player, the player compensates for the pure blacks and they look proper on TV, but if one sets the blacks to NTSC 7.5 to begin, they get washed out to muddy grey.

[Baldrick]

This isn't authoring. Moving your topic.