preserving letterbox format

[teklife]

i have a movie which is an .avi in letterbox format. when i encode and burn it with toast 6, the finished product is a 4:3 movie.

i then converted it to a .mov file and tried creating a dvd with idvd, in which i made an excellent custom theme, but it too resulted in a 4:3 movie. what can i do to preserve the letterbox format in a final dvd? thanks

marc

[live4ever]

Are you sure you don't mean anamorphic? Letterbox is 4:3 with black bars.

[thoughton]

When I last checked iDVD could only deal with 4:3 video. For widescreen stuff you need DVDSP.

You can drop it onto ffmpegX and choose the ffmpeg DVD preset, and select letterbox in the options tab.

[TugBoat]

Yea, do you mean preserve a 16:9 letterbox (which really isn't necessary), or preserve an Anamorphic 16:9 movie?
There are a couple work arounds for Anamorphic 16:9. I don't know about the iDVD thing, never tried it;
http://videosystems.primediabusiness.com/ar/video_alternative_methods/#sidebar
Probably best to search the iDVD board at Apple for something current. Of course, there's always Ifoedit in VPC...

The Toast thing is that you use another encoder to encode a DVD spec anamorphic m2v, then drag that into the Toast Video Tab. As long as it's DVD spec, Toast won't re-encode it to 4:3 but instead mux it as anamorphic 16:9 with a proper 4:3 menu.

As far as encoding Anamorphic 16:9 with iDVD or Toast, neither one will do it....yet.