16:9 avi. with TMPGEnc???

[derekwc]

Is it at all possible to take an avi that was capped in 16:9 or whatever
widescreen format and make an MPEG for DVD with the black bars so
it has full aspect ratio???

Or will you just always have a streched picture that will only look good on a widescreen television????

[celtic_druid]

On a 4:3 setup the black bars should be added by the player to fill the screen whilst mainting the AR. If on the other hand you encode as WS 4:3 you would have to zoom on a 16:9 setup, resulting in bad quality.

So the best setup is to leave it 16:9.

[derekwc]

I didn't choose the way the cap was made...I'm just stuck with it....

I don't understand how the black bars magically get added when there were
never any there to begin with?

[celtic_druid]

The player adds them when you play a 16:9 source and have the output set to 4:3.

[guns1inger]

If you have your player set up correctly, and if the disk has been authroed correctly.

Q. When you play commercial disks 16:9 enhanced disks, do they play back stretched ?

If they do, then your player needs to be changed to display 16:9 as letterboxed. You will find this somewhere in the configuration menu of the player. Essentially, it tells the player to display the output as widescreen in a 4:3 display.

If commercial disks do play correctly, and it is only this disk that is a problem, then the issue is with the authoring. Either the video was not encoded with 16:9 flags, or the disk was not authored as a 16:9 disk. Both the encoding and the authoring issues can be fixed.

[reboot]

I won't get into why, but here's how to letterbox in tmpgenc.
On the Advanced tab, set the source to 1:1 VGA, keep aspect ratio 2.
On the Setting tab, set it to NTSC 720x480 (or PAL 720x576, depending on where you live) and 4:3 aspect.
Tmpgenc will now letterbox the encode.
No stretching, no squishing, no cropping.

[Bondiablo]

Has anyone ever determined the differnece between "full screen keep aspect ratio" and "full screen keep aspect ratio 2"? I always use "full screen keep aspect ratio" and have never noticed a problem.

Also, on the Setting > Video tab you may want to set the aspect ratio to 16x9 so, should you ever get the chance to play it on a widescreen tv, you wont get black bars on all 4 sides. As, I believe, Celtic Druid was suggesting.

[reboot]

kar "2" is faster. Otherwise I believe they do the identical thing.
Bondiablo has a good point. If you ever want to watch them on a true widescreen, set source to 16:9, and your player should handle the rest.

[derekwc]

So I discovered the keep aspect ratio setting, which was the solution to my problem.

However on certain files I will keep the audio(like my JLU files), but for some reason with these
old Gamera movies the audio fails to show up on the final disc?

Any thoughts?

[reboot]

Do audio separately.
Extract it from the source.
Add it back during authoring.
You may need to transcode it to mp2 or ac3, but encoding audio in a video encoder (tmpgenc) is silly, because tmpgenc chokes on everything except .wav and maybe mp2.