Losing edges of widescreen video

[julesh]

I've got a source AVI file that I'm looking to convert to DVD format for playback on my TV. The source AVI has a 2.21:1 aspect ratio (according AVIcodec, although the resolution 640x272 doesn't quite match). The original source is a standard widescreen movie DVD.

I'm aware that when such things are produced, they are generally designed such that some amount of the picture can be lost off either side of the screen without impacting the action which happens in the centre of the screen.

I was just wondering what, in people's experience here, that amount is. I'm aware that with my TV & DVD player, when I encode a 720x576 DVD I lose about 25 pixels on either side of the image, so I should imagine that most DVDs are produced to account for a similar loss, but is it actually larger? Do other people lose more pixels than me?

[Suntan]

I think the average overscan on a CRT TV is 5% (from what I have read, don't quote me.) When talking about digital displays; be it LCD, Plasma, DLP,LCOS, etc. depending on the resolution and timing you feed it you can get overscan or eliminate it.

I get around it by using Zoomplayer (via my HTPC) setup with a custom playback size and postion within a 720x480 screen resolution (on a crappy 27" CRT).

-Suntan

[iantri]

TVs overscan 5-10%, but this is a non-issue.

Film (and Video, for the reason of TV overscan) is shot with the expectation of poor cropping around the edges, since many theatres do a piss-poor job of aligning the projector properly (take a good look, and you may find that there is a sizeable amount of image being projected onto the black border around the screen at your local theatre).

Nothing special is done to DVD releases to compensate -- you don't need to do anything either.