recorded DVD for 16:9 AND 4:3 format ? How to ?

[ktnwin]

I just ran into a pleasant surprise with my new HDTV (wide screen). I had a home digital video taped at 16:9 ratio. When I play this on my new HDTV, the whole thing fits the screen exactly (no black bars top/bottom). Another second surprise is after transferring this tape to my DVD recorder, the resulting DVD disc plays same as the tape, i.e. the picture fits the screen perfectly.

Now is the non-pleasant part. When I play this DVD disc on a regular TV (4:3), then everyone in the movie look tall and thin. I guess they must be happy seeing themselves that slim, but that's not what I like.

Is there anything I can do when recording the DVD disc so that when I play on the regular TV, there will be black top/bottom bars to maintain the 16:9 ratio as commercial DVD ? How does the commercial DVD make this happen ?

[ktnwin]

anyone ??? I still waiting with patience.

[wulf109]

Look at the DVD players setup menu. There should be a screen to determine 4:3 P&S,4:3 LTX,and 16:9,it maybe a change in that setting will work.

[ktnwin]

Already tried, it did not work. I have seen somewhere mentioning that each DVD contains a DAR (display aspect ratio) flag. the DVD player keys of this flag to squeeze the video vertically on the 4:3 TV. If you setup for wide screen then this flag tell the player to leave it alone.
So, my main question is when you author your home DVD, how do you set this DAR field ? Does any authoring software support this ?

[aubrey_q]

What authoring program are you using? How are you encoding it to MPEG-2? What software do you use to capture the video?

My guess is that you need to use something like TMPGEnc to convert your captured video to and MPEG-2 file with 4:3 aspect ratio. I'm not 100% sure that TMPGEnc can do it, but you could try. You can then author a DVD menu with two choices so the viewer can select which format he wants to see.

[ktnwin]

Actually, the following method gave the same results
1) use standalone DVD recorder, it copy anamorphic digital tape as anamorphic DVD
2) use Studio 8 to capture, encode and burn disc
3) use Studio 8 to capture, TMPGEnc to encode (keeping 4:3 aspect ratio)
In any of these methods, the video is treated as 4:3 aspect ration (squeeze horzontally).
That's why they play great on wide screen TV (perfect fit). And they are squeeze horizontally on 4:3 TV.
Any software out there allow me to set DAR aspect ratio ? (so it works like commercial DVD movies).

[Vejita-sama]

You want to author an apomorphic DVD. This is a DVD where the m2v video is 720x480 (the picture takes up the full resolution). You then flag the movie as either 16:9 or 4:3. I only know how to do this is DVD Maestro.

As Wulf109 said thou, you also need to have your DVD Player setup correctly to play the apomorphic disc.

[noobee]

if you still have the m2v file, you could change the pixel aspect ratio in the video stream with "pulldown.exe ... -aspect_ratio 16:9"... and then also set the display aspect ratio to "16:9 letterbox" in your authoring program (or patching the authored files with ifoedit).

hopefully, the "black bars" will show up on 4:3 displays while keeping the 16:9 aspect ratio.

not sure if this method will work, please let us know if you try it?

[DEmberton]

Yes pulldown.exe should do the trick. I've done this myself with SVCDs to create anamorphic WS SVCDs, but not many DVD players detect the flags properly for SVCDs, but they should for DVD.

Does anybody know if it's possible to record the pan&scan info on a DVD? I seem to remember this being touted as one of the benefits of DVD (i.e. P&S and WS on the same disc), but I've never seen any discs that use it.

Dave

[ktnwin]

noobee,
thanks for the suggestion, that's exactly what I am looking for.
I will try it and let you know.