VCD being cropped on Samsung DVD player

[WhoIsTheFly]

I posted this in the authoring forum. But perhaps it's an issue with my player itself. Any thoughts?

I am currently archiving 20 minute segments that were originally in AVI format. They are in the NTSC aspect of 352x240.

I have used TMPGEnc to convert them using the provided NTSC template.

I also created some graphics from scratch at 352x240, dropped them into an AVI editor and made short video sequences out of them. These I also converted with TMPGEnc and the NTSC template.

I created a VCD and burned it successfully. I used EZ CD creator 5.0 Platinum.

Now, the caveat. When playing the VCD (many versions which I "tweaked" , re-encoded, used different video clips, etc.) the borders seem to be cut off. One video is a subtitled program and the sub titles are nearly cut off. on either side, there is about 18 pixels cropped out and about the same from the bottom. (not sure about the top)

What could be causing this?

The DVD player, by the way is a Samsung DVDM301 and the television is a Philips 27" Stereo TV — 27PS50B.

When playing the VCD with VCD Cutter, enlarging the windows to full screen, I can see the entire video and it is not cropped.

[wildcatfan]

It's called overscan and all tv's do it up to a point (although 18 lines seems alot)...this is something you have to consider when you encode and not put too much too close to the edges.

Michael

[WhoIsTheFly]

I see. Well, I can resize my Menus since they're just imaged I dropped into Personal AVI Editor to give them a black border to allow for the cropping.

But is there a way to do similar on the videos? Besides sizing them down and using something like premiere to put a border around them...ugh..that would blow..*WINKS*

Thanks for the info....

[vitualis]

TMPGEnc can encode your AVI with a border I believe.

This is an important factor that people often don't take into account when making video for display on TV. The TV display will crop up to 10% (though usually only about 5%) off all sides. When making video, you will have to ensure that there isn't any visually important data on the edges.

The demo VCD available at the VCDImager side has a number of test screens including one which measures the degree of cropping on your DVD+TV system.

Regards.

[WhoIsTheFly]

Great! I'll have to play with TMPGEnc and see if I can get that to work!

It's only been a problem on one or two of the VCDs I did because of subtitle placement. And I've seen the programs many times so I know what's going on. But for those who have never seen them, it's a pain. *winks*

Thanks a million!

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: WhoIsTheFly on 2001-10-01 06:02:00 ]</font>

[greenpig]

I have hit the same problem, and I managed to reduce my image size to use the "safe area" of the screen. I posted details about a sound problem on http://www.vcdhelp.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?topic=59850&forum=3 but there are some minor details about the image resizing.

I had my source image at 440x528 which was a 5% reduction all-round (PAL) and that is great on my DVD-TV combo. In TMPGEnc, I selected the source video details as CUSTOM size and entered 440,528 and then selected the CLIP filter and specified black as my border (I tried orange on a few trials until I found a size that matched my TV).

Good Luck.

[WhoIsTheFly]

Right on! I'll have to give that a shot. Though I've found a HKdvd version of the series I'm trying to archive on VCD, so I don't know if I want to through the whole sh'bang of re-encoding all these episodes. *winks*

I have to wait and find out how my DVD player (samsung m301) fares against "all region" DVD's.

But there are some projects I'll give this a try with. Thanks!