DVD Player that can play ANY resolution?!?

[zilog_jones]

I've recently been testing MPEG2 encoding and SVCD/CVD authoring for playback with my European (Region 2, PAL) JVC XV-N55 DVD Player.

I've mostly been converting DivX and XviD stuff by resizing, IVTC-ing and speeding up to 25fps with VirtualDubMod, or just using homemade Flash stuff, and encoding into MPEG2 bbMPEG - though on my crap Celeron it takes 1:30 hours to convert SEVEN MINUTES of video! I was then authoring them with VCDImager. The results aren't bad, so I can't complain. Though there was one exception:

I was wondering why one of the SVCD videos I made looked so flickery (the horizontal line kind of flickery - like what you get with VHS tapes) and generally a lot more crappy quality than the other videos I had, and I just assumed it was because it was because it was taken from a lower resolution DivX video than the others (320x240). I never thought twice about it, until I saw the MPEG2 file was still on my PC, and I looked at the file info, and the resolution was: 352x276!!! I must have accidentally typed a '2' instead of a '5' when resizing it (I was using the PAL CVD resolution of 352x576 for my SVCDs, which worked OK on my player).

How in the name of God did my pretty average DVD player play such non-standard resolution video?!? Has this happened to anyone else? Has anyone else even tried it?

I'm going to have to try this with other resolutions. I have heard from the user comments here about that player that it won't play 720x480 SVCDs, so there must be some limits to this madness.

Maybe it's something to do with how the player is able to display normal JPEG pictures at any resolution (up to a certian amount) - maybe it's got some sort of dynamic resizing/scaling system for that, and it just uses the same system for video too or something? It's all quite odd...

[zilog_jones]

Er, has anyone else tried making VCD/SVCD/DVDs with non-standard resolutions, and see if they work on their standalone players? Note that some authoring tools like Nero don't like them, however VCDImagerGUI gives some warnings but works OK.

Hmm, I think I'll try standard computer resolutions next, like 320x240 and 640x480. Maybe it was because of the standard horizontal resolution that the 352x276 one worked, though I'm still amazed at how it stretched it to normal 4:3 display...