Black strip at the bottom when playing DVD

[ChiSholm]

I recorded a show on tv with a dvd recorder and used mpg2cut2 to cut out the commercials which produced a .mpg file. I wanted to burn the .mpg file back to dvd so I used DGMPGDec to demultiplex it (was told to by DVDAuthorGUI cos I couldn't author the .mpg file).

After which I got 2 files, .m2v and .mpa. I added these files to DVDAuthorGUI to author DVD and got some files (.vob etc) which I could use Nero to burn to dvd. The problem is that when I playback the DVD on my DVD player, I see a black strip (about 2inches?) at the bottom of the video. It's no longer fullscreen. Could someone tell me what I did wrong or what I could do to not have that black strip?

This is my first time trying to do this...

[ChiSholm]

I've noticed that this 'problem' came right from the start after I cut the .vob file from my DVD+RW using mpg2cut2, however I'm not sure why this is so. The aspect which I've selected under 'view' is 'Aspect Standard'. Any ideas?

[guns1inger]

Probably need to know a little more about the source - free to air, digital, cable etc. and the source aspect ratio. also, what are you testing on ? Is it a 4:3 TV, widescreen switchable 4:3 or widescreen (16:9) TV ?

I say this because, at least in Australia, all digital broadcasts are 16:9, even if the original program aspect ratio was 4:3. Most digital STBs have the facility to zoom this to 4:3 to fill a 4:3 screen, however when recording off a PC tuner, the recording will be 16:9. On the other hand, many DVD recorders seem to be unable to record 16:9 material with a 16:9 flag set, so even through the image has a 16:9 aspect ratio, the material is flagged as 4:3.

Somewhere in your processing, you may have actually corrected this error and put the 16:9 flag back into the stream, which would make 4:3 material now appear to be letterboxed and pillarboxed, giving your borders all around.

[ChiSholm]

It's a widescreen LCD TV but I also see the black strip when I playback on my pc using WinDVD.

I didn't record it off a PC tuner, recorded it off directly from source TV with a DVD recorder. After some tests, it seems to me that the black strip only appeared after I used mpg2cut2 to cut out the commercials; so I figured it could be some settings in mpg2cut2 (although I didn't change any settings; assumed default settings should be ok) but am not sure what. I've tried cutting with TMPGenc MPEG editor before mpg2cut2 and the outcome seems fine but it's only the trial version (I can't afford to pay for the full version for cutting commercials off tv shows which was why I tried mpg2cut2).

[guns1inger]

mpeg2cut2 should not re-encode the video, which would make it hard for it to make major changes to the image. It is, essentially, a direct stream copy type editor.

Can you post before and after screen shots ?

[ChiSholm]

I tried using womble instead and that works well for me so I guess I'll just stick to that.