Divx 640x480 always encodes to 720x480

[obe1k]

I have a Divx which is 640x480 24fps but it looks like a widescreen picture, so I'm guessing that it has letterboxing added to it.

When I encode with TMPGEnc Plus it always changes the ratio to 720x480. (with the exception of 4:3 fullscreen which makes it 704x480.)

I have tried using all the different Video Arrange Methods - keep aspect ratio 1 & 2, and 'No Margin' and also tried all of these options with 4:3 and 16:9.

When encoding to 16:9, the aspect ratio is kept but black bars are added to the sides, which makes for a tiny picture.

Is there a way to force TMPGEnc to encode to 640x480 or perhaps 720x540 which is what the screen stretches it to when played? All the options to change the ratio are greyed out.

cheeers

[Tommyknocker]

Load the video. Select Load-->Extra-->Unlock.vcf. Return to the main screen. Select Setting. The options should no longer be ghosted.

[obe1k]

That worked an absolute treat! cheers mate.

Just one thing, when using TMPGEnc without using the wizard is it possible to see the same bitrate settings page as in the wizard, in order to see how much space on a DVD the selected bitrate will take up?

cheers

[Tommyknocker]

Not to my knowledge. However, you can use the wizard page as a guide, and simply note the bit rate and use it when in manual mode. Also, you can select Expert-->Video tab--2-pass VBR to unlock the settings in Wizard mode. Just remember to reset the bit rate mode, as 2-pass rate takes longer than most modes.

[obe1k]

Well I encoded the movie to mpeg-2 640x480 but my authoring software transcodes it which make the file about 7Gb!

I guess this is because it's not the right width for DVD - 720.

Is there a program that will allow me to crop some of the black bars from top and bottom?? Then I could resize it to 720x480 without distorting the picture.

[deaddog]

The only time I have had a divx which had borders, I used tmpgenc own "cut" option (under the settings -> advanced tab). Its a doddle to use.

However I was told that the best thing was to take the original avi and use virtualdub to re-encode the divx minus the borders (video->filters->[add button]->null transform->[okay button]->cropping), and then feed that into tmpgenc

[obe1k]

Ok, I cut 27 off the top and bottom black bars with TMPGEnc

which brought the resolution to 640x426. How did I arrive at this number?

720/480 = 1.5 and 640/426 = 1.50234.... which is as close as I can get it.

Then I just did a 4:3 NTSC film @ 720x480 Fullscreen, which looks perfect on my standalone. At first TMPGEnc tried to defaut to 352x480 but this looked pretty bad qualitywise. 720x480 doesn't look as good as the original, but it's pretty close, and the aspect ratio is spot on.

It seems like it took a long time to get not much of a result, but at least I've learned a bit about aspect ratios etc..

I tried to use VirtualDubMod to crop the black bars, but you can't do it in Direct Stream Copy mode. If left uncompressed, the movie would turn out HUGE. I had to uncompress the original Mpeg-4 and recompress to Divx 5.1 which resulted in pretty horrible quality.