4:3 letterbox to 16:9 true widescreen

[olegy]

I just purchased a new HDTV widescreen TV and have noticed, that some widescreen DVDs are in fact 4:3 dvds ( Armageddon, original Stargate, Highlander, etc) , which leads to ugly picture on the screen - both vertical and horizontal bars. I can zoom it to fill the screen, but PQ suffers. After searching the internet I found the only way to convert that kind of DVDs to the true 16:9 DVD is to demux all the streams, frameserve adjusted move stream to the mpeg encoder of your choice, combine all into a new vob set and by using VobBlanker replace the original mpg stream with a new one. I tried and it works. Problems - takes too long to re-encode a movie stream, interlacing problems, loosing multiangle features ( Vobblanker cannot work with multiangle vobs).
Is there a more simple way to transcode the frames, like DVDShrink or DVDtoOne do? Anyone with a solution?

[tonemgub]

Seems like your DVD player needs to be set to 16:9 AR. A true FS DVD will not have bars at top or bottom.

[guns1inger]

No. The problem is that you have to crop and resize, hence the need to re-encode. Transcoders only screw around with the encoding that has already been done, but don't fundamentally change the content, just the compression. I know that not all movies are enchanced for widescreen (16:9), but both the special edition of Armageddon (not the criterion release though) and the special edition of StarGate are 16:9 (at least in PAL land). Maybe you just have to be picky about what you purchase now.

[wwaag]

olegy

You can use DVD Rebuilder (freeware) to easily accomplish this. Do the following: select Options, then AVS Options, Advanced (Expert) Options and finally Convert from LB 4:3 to 16:9. The conversion may be applied only to VTS01 (just the movie) or Apply to All. Since I only keep the move, it doesn't matter which is selected for me. I've done this for backups of a few DVDs that were 4:3 with letterboxing. Works well, although I haven't really compared the quality of this approach versus simply using the zoom function on the TV. Hope this helps.

wwaag

[MaxBlack]

...You can use DVD Rebuilder (freeware) to easily accomplish this...

wwaag how long does it take to convert? I just did this myself using DVD2SVCD (re-encoding) and a 2 hour movie took about 13 hours! Using a 3.2GHz P4 w/1G RAM even.

Inquiring minds want to know.

Also, you have NOT compared quality vs. TV's zoom? Wouldn't you want to know if the effort was worth making? I'm going to watch my new disc tonight and compare it with the non-anamorphic version, zoomed.

[wwaag]

Regarding the speed question. I have an older P4 3.06 Ghz system. For normal re-encoding (4:3 to 4:3 or 16:9 to 16:9), the speed is almost real-time. E.g. a 2hr movie will take about 2hrs 15 min. If you convert from 4:3 to 16:9, it takes longer. As I recall, I recently did Topkapi which is a 2hr movie and it was still under 3 hrs. In fact, I did a 4:3 back-up as well as a 16:9. Quality-wise, I couldn't tell the difference, although I didn't do any extensive side-by-side comparisons. For that reason, I'd chose the 16:9 since added processing time (while I'm asleep) doesn't make any real difference.

Don't understand the very long 13 hr processing time, although I suspect that you're using Tmpgenc as the encoder which is notoriously slow. I've used CCE Basic which is a lot faster and the quality is quite good IMHO.

wwaag

[MaxBlack]

wwaag thanks for yr comments; you're right about TMPGEnc--that's what I used cuz I own it already. Still, your encoding times are remarkable...

I compared my converted anamorphic widescreen disc with the zoomed original, and could not detect any improvement with the anamorphic. I guess I should be relieved that I don't need to convert my 4:3 letterboxed discs, but I *am* just a little disappointed since I'd always assumed that frame-by-frame analysis/conversion would *have to* beat the on-the-fly TV zoom feature (Sony 60XBR800).

Still, I am very impressed that for as complex as the conversion clearly is, the end result was completely glitch-free (except that the "enhanced for 16x9 TV" flag wasn't set right--I could have/should have fixed it w/PgcEdit or IfoEdit before burning). It appears that DVD2DVD and DVD Rebuilder are an easy way for novices to get our feet wet with AviSynth, and maybe venture-in to other filters and scripting. I've been reading about this for a long time but hadn't quite put all the pieces together--w/these tools the work is already mostly done for you...

[olegy]

The problem with zooming is - there is no exact zoom in most of the TVs, dvd players, still some image truncation occurs. And by my experience, still, re-encoded to 16:9 stream looks better, than a zoomed one.

[Jupiter0713]

This is all very complex - is there NO available layman's application or easy "one-click" type solution to handle this? You would think that someone would have automated this process and bundled it into one solution by now.

Im looking for a SHRINK type solution - I put the disc in, set a few settings, hit GO, and out pops 16:9 anamorphic DVD video files ready to burn.....theres gotta be something out there that does just that

[Forum Troll]

Here's the way I do it:

Rip the vobs into one using DVD Decrypter

Open the new single vob in Virtualdubmod and frameserve to TMPGENC, using the 16:9 template (and adding the 3.2 pulldown where applicable.)





You are in breach of the forum rules and are being banned. You have been warned about this.
/ Moderator John Q. Publik

[guns1inger]

After all this using DVD Rebuilder, I did not know that option existed. I need to did around in the menus a bit more.

[freebird73717]

This is all very complex - is there NO available layman's application or easy "one-click" type solution to handle this? You would think that someone would have automated this process and bundled it into one solution by now.

Im looking for a SHRINK type solution - I put the disc in, set a few settings, hit GO, and out pops 16:9 anamorphic DVD video files ready to burn.....theres gotta be something out there that does just that

There is a "shrink" type solution already mentioned above.
If you download dvdrebuilder then download the rockas installer

You can use DVD Rebuilder (freeware) to easily accomplish this. Do the following: select Options, then AVS Options, Advanced (Expert) Options and finally Convert from LB 4:3 to 16:9. The conversion may be applied only to VTS01 (just the movie) or Apply to All.

[MaxBlack]

This is all very complex - is there NO available layman's application or easy "one-click" type solution to handle this?...

You haven't paid attention, sir. DVD2SVCD is indeed a "one-click" solution, as apparently is DVD Rebuilder.

The only trick w/DVD2SVCD is that you need one of the supported encoders to point-to, so you may have to install something else along w/DVD2SVCD (i.e. CCE, TMPGEnc, Qenc, others).

Try it, it's relatively simple.