I live in Europe and have a 16:9 PAL / SECAM Philips TV.

I am trying to convert / burn a non compliant VCD. Here is what the end result looks like on my TV:

"normal" display (4:3):
"target" display (16:9, full screen):

obviously, something is wrong, since what I want to get, and I know I should be able to get, is:

The fact that I get something displayed on my TV, with synchrone sound and everything, leads me to think that my standalone DVD player is able to play my non compliant VCD, how uncompliant it may be. However, what I want to get is a final product as close as possible to the scale of the source (in this case, 640 x 272), filling as much as possible my TV screen, and centered. Far from my target !

Here is my path to get to this undesirable end result:

source is (according to Virtual Dub and GSpot) 735,092,736 bytes, 01 hr 06 min 15 sec, codex is XviD, video bitrate is 1355 kb/s, audio is 0x0055(MP3) MPEG-1 Layer 3, 116 kbs, 58/ch, stereo, VBR Lame 3.90, frame size is 640 x 272 (2.35:1). I must say, the quality (image wise) of the source is, played on my PC, rather superb by my standards.

VDub identifies a few bad frames in my source, which I edit out. I then "direct stream copy" the cleaned video to an intermediary AVI file, and "full process" the audio stream to an intermediary WAV file, converting to 44 kHz on the way.

Both intermediary files are fed into TMPGEnc and converted into one final file. This one is then passed on to VCD Easy, confirming on the way to VCD Easy that I DO want a non-compliant PAL VCD.

I try to keep the original aspect ratio (640 x 272) because I believe this is what will get me the best end result (visually I mean - I haven't been able to resize AVI files to compliant PAL size with satisfactory results, and up till recently, I haven't had the proof that it is mandatory to resize to PAL standard to play well on my stabdalone player).

I have tried most imaginable combinations of template driven / unlocked settings in TMPGEnc, without progress. I would suspect this is where I am going wrong because, frankly, I am not sure I understand clearly the differences between video stream settings and "advanced" video source settings. It also seems logical to set the TMPGEnc System settings to MPEG-1 Video CD (non standard) but maybe logic is not the right approach here ? And what about VCD Easy ? Would that be where the thing goes wrong ?

What do the experts say ? Thank you in advance