Aspect Ratio when ripping II

[Nina2]

Is there really nobody who knows how to deal with aspect ratio when ripping? Or was my question poorly formulated?

BTW, I use Gordian Know and I have followed the guide on this forum to the letter.

[manono]

Hi-

I expect there are a thousand people around here that would know the answer, if they could understand the question.

But I'll take a stab at it, and if I get it wrong, correct me and be more precise in your next post.

You say you're using Gordian Knot. So I'll assume you have a DVD, and want to make an AVI, either DivX or XviD, since that's the most common use for GKnot. You decrypted the DVD to the hard drive using DVD Decrypter, and you made a Movie.d2v Project File using DGIndex. Have I got it right so far? While in DGIndex, you pay attention to the Statistics window over on the right side, either while running the Preview, or when creating the Project File. It'll tell you whether your DVD is 4:3 or 16:9. If you forgot to notice which it was, then open one of the Vob files in DGIndex again and run the Preview briefly. Then you open the Movie.d2v in GKnot, and in the Resolution Tab, you set it for either 4:3 or 16:9 (16:9 is default) depending on what DGIndex said. Then you crop away the black bars if any (I use the Pixel Crop), and you pick a resolution, trying to get down near 0% Aspect Error (I consider 0.5% and below good enough), perhaps doing a bit more cropping into the video. And I guess you can take it from there.

DVDs are either 4:3 or 16:9. The original 720x480/576 Vob Files, as shown in DGIndex or when the Movie.d2v is opened up in GKnot are unresized, and frequently look "distorted". But they get resized by your DVD player so that they look normal on playback. AVIs are usually 1:1, and look normal from the beginning. GKnot will do that resizing for you. If you want to see how the final AVI will look after cropping and resizing, look above the picture of your movie and go Video->Resized, and you'll see what the final result will be.

So what? Did I completely miss your question?

[Nina2]

Hi there,

Thanx for answering!

For starters, you were right in your assumptions of what I wanted to do. The problem is that the black bars at top/bottom is thicker (about one cm) when I play back a DVD on my computer (either directly from the DVD or after having ripped the DVD) than when I play back a DVD on my ordinary Sony DVD player.

I have now been researching some more. It seems the problem is my video card. For some reason it seems that the video card (1) does not cover the whole of the TV screen (meaning it is black bars of one cm also when displaying the desktop, and of course these black bars will come in addition to the usual black bars when playing DVDs, and (2) ads black bars more in the corners than in the middle(!).

I am using a brand new asus videcard (Radeon x700). So I am a little surprised about this. BUT the s-video cable that I am using is very cheap. The cheapest kind and longer than necessary. Do you think it would improve if a bought a short and better s-video cable???

[mats.hogberg]

I think you're confused by the TV overscan. On a TV, the image "goes beyond" the visible area, so you don't see the edges. Computer monitors don't do this. If you see more black bars in the corners (the image takes on a barrel shape), I'd say the TV is misaligned.

/Mats