DVD player cuts sides and tops off SVCD picture - FIX?

[zizou108]

I am having this problem - I can encode a widescreen (letterboxed) SVCD, and my standalone DVD player plays it fine and with proper ratio, but it seems to chop off about 10% of the picture on all sides . The only way I could fix the problem was by shrinking the picture by 10%, by setting TMPGEnc's Video Arrange Method to "Center (custom size)" at 432 wide by whatever (depending on input AVI's size ratio), while keeping output at 480x480 (NTSC). Then I seem to see the whole picture, including black borders at top and bottom.

What is going on here? I have Pioneer DV-333 - don't know if this problem is specific to Pioneer DVD players, or is more common. Plays DVDs (including widesceen) perfectly.

Have not seen any discussion of this issue on this forum. Is there a better fix than what I came up with?

Thanks,

zizou108

[Truman]

http://forum.vcdhelp.com/viewtopic.php?t=76947

This phenomenon is called TV overscan. You do not see the whole SVCD framesize as well as you do not see the whole DVD framesize. That is quite OK, because a lot of commercial DVD's come with very crappy edges. But if you encode to a low-bitrate format like SVCD you have to take care to save as much bits as ever possible. So do not encode what you can not see.

[zizou108]

Truman,

Thanks - was not aware of the "overscan" term (or the problem). Thanks for the tip.

zizou108