Possible to matte video with ffmpegX?

[Sea Manky]

I've just gotten started with video conversion and DVD authoring, and I'm trying to convert some of my fansub AVI's to DVD so I can watch them on my TV.

So far, I've been able to use ffmpegX to convert to MPEG-2 and then use Sizzle to make a playable disc that works just fine except for one problem. When I play the disc on my DVD player, I lose about 20 pixels around the borders of the picture because it extends past the edges of the TV. From what I've read, this is normal for DVD, but I'd like to avoid it, since the bottom of my subtitles is getting cut off. I'm also concerned about the aspect ratio since the AVI's are 640x480, and DVD requires me to scale it to 720x480.

So what I'd like to do is matte the picture by adding black bars to the top, bottom, and sides while scaling and centering my video stream so the whole original image is viewable on the TV. Is there a way for ffmpegX to do this, or do I need another tool to matte the video? And if so, what such tools are available that can run in Mac OS X?

Thanks for your time.

[major]

Run your AVI through DivX Doctor II, open the resulting MOV wrapper in Quicktime Player, open Movie Properties and set Mask to add black bars and Size. Save as with dependancies. Encode the resulting MOV with ffmpegX.

Okay, I did as you said, but when I apply the mask, Quicktime Player uses it to crop the video rather than add black bars to the margins. Am I missing a step?

[major]

Letterboxing is automatic when you encode a MOV file to mpeg-2 with "Decode with Quicktime". By the way, you can also letterbox with Quicktime Player by making a black picture, opening it in QT, select all, copy, add scaled and set the layer level.