Display format of finished product

[jnojr]

OK... I took a movie that was a 16:9 "letterbox" in 4:3 and used TMPGEnc to trim off the black bars and wound up with a movie that was 16:9 I verified that with DVD2AVI. It played just fine on my widescreen TV (except I should have left a little of the black bars to compensate for overscan, I think). However, a friend played the movie on his 4:3 TV, and he described the picture as being cut off a little at the top and bottom and a lot on the sides, almost like the player zoomed in on a 4:3 "window" in the middle of the material. He does say he checked the settings of his player, and that "real" DVDs display correctly. Is there something else I need to do to make my DVDs truely anamorphic?

[petar]

However, a friend played the movie on his 4:3 TV, and he described the picture as being cut off a little at the top and bottom and a lot on the sides, almost like the player zoomed in on a 4:3 "window" in the middle of the material.

That's actually exactly what the player did. Either he's got the player set up for 4:3 pan&scan or you've authored a 16:9 DVD that only allows pan&scan (not letterboxed) display on 4:3.

[jnojr]

What would tell a DVD that it had to play as "pan and scan"? What would I need to do to avoid that with TMPGEnc?

[petar]

The authoring tool, when creating the DVD. You can flag a 16:9 video for a 4:3 display as automatic letterboxed, pan&scan or both.


In this DVD, as you can see, the menu is set for pan&scan and the movie for letterboxed. You can change this with Ifoedit so you don't need to re-author your DVD from scratch.