Lower video encoding tips for small 7 inch screen

[hauns]

Hi, I just have a few Newbie questions. I just recently got a car dvd player with a 7 inch screen thats pretty sweet. I have quite a few movies stacked up in my car so I want to get rid of some. What I want to do is to put possibly a couple movies per disk, as well as eliminate 5.1 sound to stereo. Anybody recommend and software to re-encode my movies to a lower resolution/bitrate (and any recommendation of settings that will still look sharp, I assume that they dont need to be as high since the screen is tiny compared to my HDTV), as well as software to encode my audio streams to stereo? Thanks I appreciate it!

[jagabo]

DVD allows only a few resolutions: 720x480, 704x480, 352x480, and 352x240. 352x240 would allow the greatest running time but the loss of resolution would probably be quite noticeable even on a 7" screen. 352x480 would allow you to put roughly twice as much on a disc and won't look too much worse. You may have problems with resolutions below 704x480 as the DVD spec doesn't officially support anamorphic wide screen with the lower resolutions (although it might work on your player). Is your display 4:3 or 16:9?

If your player supports Divx/Xvid you can put several movies on a disc as AVI files.

[hauns]

Unfortunately my player does not support avi files and such, just DVD. But it is a 16:9 screen. So what exactly would to do?

[FulciLives]

Technically only Full D1 resolution (720 or 704 x 480 for NTSC and 720 or 704 x 576 for PAL) supports 16x9 WS anamorphic video.

You could try making a 16x9 WS anamorphic video at Half D1 resolution (352x480 for NTSC and 352x576 for PAL) as some DVD players will work with such a source ... but not all.

So test to see if it works. If so then that would be your "best bet" for reduction in quality and size.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[jagabo]

I did a little looking around -- the 7 inch widescreen car players I saw all had 480x234 displays. So encoding at 352x240 may not look too bad. It's worth a try.

One other thing you should check: see if your player will play VOB or MPG files off ISO data discs. If it does, try encoding a video at the player's native resolution, presumably 480x234.

[hauns]

I didn't know that it was possible to make a 352x240 resolution DVD. I thought that this was a VCD resolution only. I guess I could give it a try. Just curious, will this make the aspect ratio change? I am having a hard time distinqusing the diff between aspect ratios and resolutions. Oh yeah, what software can I use to burn a dvd with the 352x240 resolution anyways? I would prefer mac software, but I do have a pc as well? Thanks for the suggestions.