avi to vcd ?

[coachrapture]

Hi guys,
I already searched the forum and couldn't find an answer. Hopefully you guys can help out. When I try to convert an avi to vcd with mpeg2enc, the resulting file has letterboxing and looks stretched. However, when I uncheck the letterboxing option and reencode it, it looks fine, but when I play the disc on the dvd player, the subtitles are too low and you can tell some of the picture has been cropped out. The source file is 640 x 480, and the preset I use is the 352 x 240. Is there a better aspect ratio that will allow the subtitles to be seen on the screen without any of the picture being cropped. I tried to set the vcd to 352 x 480 as one post about determing aspect ratios said, but the progress bar will get to 100% before failing. Thanks for any info you guys can give.

[major]

Where do you take the subtitle from, are they a SRT file, are they already in the source?

[coachrapture]

Hi,
Thanks for the response. They are in a .srt format.

[major]

Then if you burn srt into VCD by using "Decode with mplayer", you can set the subtitle height in the filters tab (try Pos=80 instead of 100).

[coachrapture]

Thanks. I'll try that, but won't it still cut out some of the picture. I don't understand why it's doing that if the source avi is 4:3.