mpg to divx - how to stop black bars from widescreen to be cropped away ?

[tgrmatic]

Hi,

New to this forum, I have looked around a bit but couldn't find any answer yet. If this has been asked before sorry for posting.

I've used 1 step converters to go from mpg files to divx files on two different PCs : DivX Converter and AutoGK. In both cases the black bars of the wide screen mpg are cropped (I think). When playing the divx the image is playing on the top of the screen with the bottom filled up black, not in the center as it should be wide screen. Where do I start to solve this ?

Thanks

[mats.hogberg]

Taking out the top & bottom black bars is std procedure when encoding to AVI. The player (hardware or software) should center it in the display. So the point of attack is the player. Or, you can tell AutoGK how much (if any) to crop. But you'll waste some bitrate encoding the black bars into your AVI...


/Mats

[tgrmatic]

Tnx for the fast reply. I also used several software players with same result. But your comments me look into again and what I noticed is the following. The mpg is a cap I made with a TV card, somehow it produces some garbage in the bottom black bar. It looks like a grey bar completely at the bottom but not over the whole width. Apparently it's enough for the encoding to remove only the top bar and not the bottom bar hence I get stuck with only a bottom bar on my avi. I'll try to crop it away with AutoGK.