TV Overscan

[hudster]

I've captured Star wars from the original VHS movie I own, but when I watch it on TV I lose a small part of the picture due to the TV overscan.

How do I add borders to the picture so I can get the whole picture on screen or am I stuck with losing a part of the movie?

Cheers

[energy80s]

You are best not to add borders as the overscan area on each TV is slightly different, so the borders could be visable on one set and masked out on another. Also if you watch it on a PC monitor or video projector the borders will always be visable.

[zilog_jones]

You'll probably be safe if you made a very small border, like 5 pixels on the top and bottom and equal proportion on the left and right (if you're using half-D1 resolution - 352x576 - that'll be about 3 pixels on the left and right).

Assuming you're using a DVD player and an RGB SCART connection to watch it on you TV, there's the problem with nearly every TV that with RGB inputs it seems to always shift the picture slightly to the left compared with RF or composite inputs, so you'll have to take that into account too.

I had to add borders to a SVCD I made taken from a fansub (homebrew subtitle type thing), where they didn't take into account the overscan, so the subtitles were too low down and wouldn't have been visible on a normal TV. From a 352x576* picture I took off 16 pixels vertically and 10 horizontally, and it was (more-or-less) OK on my TV.

(*Yes I know it's not SVCD standard resolution, but it works OK on most players and I'm not going to have sleepless nights over 128 lines I might not see on an analogue TV anyway.)