Unusual Widescreen to DVD

[Sakuya]

I have an AVI that's incredibly wide. It's in widescreen but the video resolution is 856x480! Is this still considered widescreen or is it no longer in standard resolutions? How should I convert this to DVD MPEG-2 using TMPGEnc Plus? Since I have a 4:3 TV, for widescreen videos, I usually set the aspect ratio as 16:9 and then the Video Arrange Method to Full Screen (keep aspect ratio). That would add the black bars top and bottom that I need for the 4:3 TV screen.

Also, is it better to encode in Constant Quality or Constant Bitrate?

[manono]

Hi-

856x480 (mod 8, which isn't so good) is what you get when you resize a 16:9 720x480 DVD. 480 x 16/9 = 853.333. It's definitely widescreen. If it were I, I'd just resize it to 720x480 using AviSynth, and then feed the .avs into the encoder and encode as 16:9. But I don't use TMPGEnc, so I have no idea how you'd set it up in there. Maybe someone else will know.

[bugster]

Just treat the same as any other video and TmpGenc should resize it correctly.

Use CQ rather than CBR, but if you need to be sure of the final filesize, use 2-pass VBR and use a bitrate calculator to determine the correct average bitrate.

[Sakuya]

What are the differences between CQ and CBR? I don't use 2-pass at all because usually that takes extra long for me.

[bugster]

What are the differences between CQ and CBR? I don't use 2-pass at all because usually that takes extra long for me.

CQ is Constant Quality. It is a form of one pass VBR. It is slightly slower than CBR but can usually produce better quality. Main downside is you cannot accuratley predict the final filesize so longer encodes can end up too big to fit on a disk. SO you either author oversize and then shrink with something like DVDshrink with a resulting quality loss (amount depends on how much you have to shrink), or you re-encode with a lower CQ value and hope it now fits.

2-pass VBR may take twice as long as CBR or CQ, but you will get quality as good as if not better than CQ and you can calculate the correct bitrate to generate a certain filesize (with pretty good though not perfect accuracy). SO you never have to shrink or re-encode.