Title Safe (S)VCDs - (S)VCDs that show up correctly on a TV

[enigma3319]

I spent nearly 2 weeks looking for solution for this problem and my friend who works for ABC or something just filled me in on this. Thought I'd share my story for anyone who wanted to know about this too.

I've been using TMPG Encoder to do encodes of some japanese tutorials I found online. They use subtitles on the top and the bottom of the screen. When I encoded them to VCD and SVCD and I watched them on TV I was losing about a 1/2 inch of the original footage on the top, left, right, and bottom of screen. I was using "Full Screen (Keep Aspect Ratio)" like I was supposed to, and I double checked them in Winamp to make sure they looked the same as the original AVI. When I played them on the DVD player for my TV I lost the top subtitles on screen and the some of the left and right of the footage.

After lots of pain and searching online I happened to ask my friend about this, showed him a clip of what I had made, and told me that the media was fine for computer but was not "Title Safe" for a TV. The definition he gave me is "Title Safing is a standard size used to prevent image cutting off on video on TVs, since all TVs crop the image output at different rates. The solution was to create a video that was smaller than the VCD spec itself, since adjusting a vcd to full screen makes it not title safe, even if you were to maintain aspect ratio. So for a VCD I used the following in TMPG Encoder to reencode a VCD mpg that I could watch on TV:

Expected Media: VCD in NTSC format
Source: 4:3 525 line media
Actual Source dimension (VCD size video 352 x 240)
Arrange Method : Center (custom size) of 310x211

I also fooled around with an SVCD I made to see when exactly the image would show up fully on TV screen. I own a curved tube TV, not a flat screen. Here's what I found to work on my curved tube TV

Title Safe VCD Arrange Method: Center (custom size)
-------------------------------------------------
1. Shave 42 pixels from width of VCD format... so 310 would be it
2. Figure out ratio of your source. For example. 352/240 is 1.46666.
3. Divide 310 by your source's ratio. For example 310 / 1.46666 gives you 211, which maintains the correct height of your source
4. Use 310 x 211 as your Custom center size.

The output preview will show a black ring around the media you're encoding, but that's OK, when you watch it on a TV that area is what will get truncated by your TV, and will leave you with actual video within that black ring. I did that with SVCD as well and my baseline cutting of 40 pixels from width seemed to do the trick to make sure whole vid showed up on TV screen. If anyone has a better way to do this then please let me know..... just thought I'd share what I learned with anyone else havin the problem. Does anyone know the custom size needed on a flat screen TV?

- Mark

[reboot]

That may work perfectly on your TV, but because different makes have different amounts of "overscan", what looks good now, may not, on a different TV.
Done right, you get no black ring either.
Do some tests, to see how much overscan you have, then adjust the custom aspect as needed.
310x211 is cutting too much.

[Cornucopia]

I would say 10% is the industry standard TitleSafe margin, 5% is the ActionSafe.

So, for NTSC VCD (352x240) you would use:
TitleSafe: 316x216
ActionSafe: 334x228

OTOH, if the original Japanese VCD was full 352x240, they should have kept their titles within titlesafe margins (but left the video to the full screen). That is the accepted correct way to do it.
Then, you might lose a little non-important background on a TV, but it'll be smooth solid background, not letterboxing/windowboxing, which would become noticealbe once you played it on a computer.

Scott