how to change letterboxed movie to fullscreen or widescreen?

[jaysison]

is it possible to do this without causing distortion? im using dvd2svcd for svcd encoding.

[SquirrelDip]

It is possible without distortion but not possible without losing information. Check the guides, you should find quite a bit of info on this.

My preference is to frameserve with AviSynth - once again, the guides have much info. Give the guides a try and then ask more specific questions...

[kpkilburn]

Not sure why you'd want to do such a thing, but...

If your source is a video file (as oppposed to VOBs), then you can use TMPGEnc to convert the video to whatever standard you want (DVD, SVCD, etc) and during the conversion modify the formatting.

You will crop off the sides of the movie if you fill the screen and since the action occurs on the sides, not just in the middle, the result will look odd. You'll possibly miss some of the visuals.

In an attempt to try to convince you not to convert widescreen to fullscreen, here is the following link...

http://www.widescreen.org/examples/starwars/index.shtml

Widescreen and letterboxed usually mean the same thing. Letterboxed is an older term and was derived from the appearance of the title sequences of full-screen movies on video. Only the titles were shown in "widescreen" in order not to crop the lettering. This was done when the titles were superimposed over some type of action.

[jaysison]

i mean like, you know when dvd's are sold with fullscreen and widescreen? can you do the aspect ratio like the dvd's? the dvd's doesn't have distortion even when in full screen.

[ZippyP.]

On commercial DVD's they use Pan 'n Scan to keep the subjects in the frame and you can't do that at home. You'll lose the sides of the frame, about 1/3 of the picture. Don't waste your time.

[SaSi]

A case when doing this is worth the while is to remove the hard-letterbox from a DVD and re-author a DVD. And that if you plan to view it on a 16:9 TV or panel.

The hard letterboxed DVD played back on a 16:9 screen will have both top-bottom and left-right black bars, generating a small picture.

Obviously this is beyond the SVCD scope.