encoding for wide screen?

[Trifu]

hi, I have a 57" wide screen t.v., I was wondering if it's possible and how I would go about encoding a video (640X360) in TMPG so that it fits my wide screen perfectly

I mean, you know how some dvds are "wide screen edition",
how would I be able to do that in tmpg with this video?

would I put the aspect ratio to 16:9, and then what else do I do?
if it's 16:9, then the size can't be 480x480 any more right? but then what do I set it too?

thanks a bunch

[Mirror_Image]

If it's 16:9, then the size can't be 480x480 any more right?

You mean because 480x480 isn't 16:9. Consider that 480x480 isn't 4:3 either...

Read this: http://www.vcdhelp.com/tmpgencexplained.htm

[BradJW]

I found I can create Wide screen VCDs and SVCDs by just simply telling TMPGEnc that the film is 4:3. Thats it. When you play it back on the PC they look stretched upwards, but on a widescreen TV or a TV with a 16:9 button they look excellent.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but an anamorphic disc is a widescreen image stretched to fill a 4:3 ratio frame. Thertefore when you compress your scan lines using a 16:9 mode you get a better quality picture at the correct ratio.

Down side is on the PC you have to play them back in a frame then change the aspect ratio of the frame to correct the proportions. (WinDVD)

Brad

[toeman]

>I found I can create Wide screen VCDs and SVCDs by just simply telling TMPGEnc that the film is 4:3. Thats it.

Do you care to explain exactly how you do that? What settings etc. Do you change anything in the Video-CD template?

[kurkku]

First: Aspect ratio have nothing to do with resolution. Resolution doesnt depend from aspect ratio and vice versa.

Second: With VCD or SVCD we have allways same standard resolution (like example 352x288 in PAL VCD). It cant be changed if we want different aspect ratio. Only thing we have to change is "Video"-settings "Aspect ratio"-field. TMPGEnc does everything for us after that. If we choose example PAL 16:9, we get anamorphic widescreen PAL-VCD. (Advanced-tab Video arrange method should be Full screen (keep aspect ratio) and Soure aspect ratio untouched)

Question: I think that TMPGEnc puts aspect ratio information to MPEG (i think there is place to aspect ratio in MPEG1/2-frame). If it is there, why DVD or VCD players wouldnt use it. Many posts says that with anamorphic widescreen vcd or svcd you have to put tv in 16:9-mode manually. All software players (BSPlayer, windvd, powerdvd) i tried, shows VCD automatically in right aspect ratio at computer screen. And if i want watch this kind of VCD with tv-output videocard and 16:9 tv, i can press "Aspect ratio->" "Original" in BSPlayer.

[Trifu]

so what happens if you set the source to 16:9,
and the final video to 16:9,
what would that do?

and i still don't understand how a SVCD video at 480 x 480 can still be wide screen???
when it shows it on t.v. won't it look very stretched out?

[gave_up]

I think the source and the final video are only flags that are contained in the mpeg. For some reason svcd doesn't seem to pay much attention to these, so it doesn't resize on a 4:3 TV.
I've had problems when I tried creating anamorphic svcds & vcds, i was getting some very strange artifacts which I couldn't (and still haven't worked out). I did however find some helpful hints on making anamorphic captures into 4:3 letterboxed encodes using VirtualDub.
Basically take your original encodes width and resize to 480 (for ntsc & pal). Then take your original 16:9 anamorphic encodes height and resize it to to 360 for NTSC or 432 for PAL. Check the expand & letterbox option in vdubs resize and change to 480 x 480 for NTSC or 480 x 576 for PAL.
These dimensions work assuming you've captured at 480x480 (NTSC) or 480x576(PAL). I presume if you captured at a lower rate, resizing your height to 3 quarters of its original capture size works.

For best results and no recompression, I tend to frameserve into tmpeg as I don't have to resave the avi

cheers

[LeeBear]

I've done a bit of testing with 16:9 (Anamorphic)VCD/SVCD. To help explain to the person who doesn't understand how a 480x480 won't be stretched when played on a TV, think of it this way there's only 2 valid aspect ratio your DVD player understands 4:3 and 16:9. It doesn't matter what resolution the actual video is encoded as the player scales it to the proper ratio so it doesn't look distort. The DAR flag that's encoded with the stream tells the player what ratio to display. For instance if you are watching an anamorphic (widescreen) DVD the DAR flag is set to the 16:9 ratio. So if you are wathing on a 16:9 TV the player doesn't have to do anything to maintain the aspect ratio. If you watch this same movie on a normal 4:3 TV the player will add the black bars at the to and bottom to maintain the aspect ratio.

So this is how DVD players handle different aspect ratios. But here comes the problem I've noticed. When you make a VCD or a SVCD the player seems to ignore the DAR flag so it always play to fill the screen. So if you encode with a 16:9 aspect ratio, your VCD will play the way it was intend to on a 16:9 tv, but if you play the same VCD on a normal 4:3 TV everything would look squashed because the black bars aren't added. I hope that helps explain things a bit.

And if anyone is interested I'ved tested this on a 16:9 HDTV Toshiba TV and a Panasonic RP62 DVD player.

-LeeBear

[jimA]

This post doesn't explain anything. it just tells you what to do.

If U have downloaded an avi in a widescreen format, and want to convert it to svcd and view it on your 16:9 tv:

In settings, the Video-tab, for Aspect Ratio select 16:9 display.
In settings, the advanced-tab, for Source Aspect Ratio select 1:1 (VGA).

If you can't edit the Aspect Ratio, open the template (mcf file) with notepad and find where it says
MPEG.Video.AspectRatio_ReadOnly = True
and change it to False

Jim

[SLK001]

Just remember this. All widescreen DVD's are 720x480 (4:3) native resolution (I'm assuming commercial DVD's). They originate as a 853x480 digital image that is resized to 720x480, then encoded (the resulting image is "scrunched" together and will look very wierd in this format if viewed at 720x480). The encoder doesn't really care what the movie is, it just encodes as you instruct it.

So, to do this at home, take any 16:9 aspect ratio digital image stream that you have, resize it to 720x480, then encode with your favorite encoder. Then, you will have to author this file to DVD with a program that recognizes a 16:9 format so that the proper flags are set so that it will display at 16:9 AR. You can also fool an authoring program into accepting your file by just telling it that it is a 4:3 file, creating a title set, then manually editing the .IFO to change the 4:3 to 16:9. Search the forum for this technique.

[wolff]

I have been useing dvdx and it has a wide screen option I made a copy
of collateral damage and it took the whole screen up.

[BradJW]

Sorry it's taken me so long to reply. I didn't explain what I did to acheive a wide screen anamorphic picture very well. I guess it's bacause there is nothing much to explain about 'how to actually do it'. It's more about why it works.

You have an input ratio option and an output ratio option (TMPGenc). Leave them both on 4:3. That's all. I'm afraid I have no experiance of the flag system that tells your player what type of film it is. I rely on my TV and my eyes to see if I should enable wide screen or not.

If you imagine a roll of film (cinema) that is anamorphic 16:9 the image will fill the negative at a ratio of 4:3. The image will be too tall. The projector then distorts the image by compressing it to a ratio of 16:9. Improving the picture quality by almost 100% (very roughly) as all of the additional information stored is pushed close together.

An anamorphic film is stored on DVD in exactly the same way, except it's yout TV that changes the ratio to 16:9 for you. Compressing the scan lines of the TV together to improve the picture quality.

Also: Being in a PAL country, when I watch an NTSC film that is not anamorphic, I can clearly see the gap between the scan lines. When the film is NTSC anamorphic and I use the 16:9 feature of my Tv the scan lines dissappear and the picture is much better.

Does this help at all? Sorry if this has already been covered. I'm not using any special templates, just bitrate calculator and 2x90 min discs for all films. Anamorphic VCDs, for me, are the way to go. IMO