making a movie widescreen?

[ICANSEEYOU7687]

well i recently got a microsoft zune...i imagine the majority of the people here know what it is, a video/music player

but anywayz I recently got a program that converts videos for me to be placed onto the zune and it works great, but one of the video clips I put onto the zune plays fine, but it is stretched to much vertically. Is there any way I can shrink the video vertically, which I guess would give it the look of being widescreen.

anywayz, i hope that made sense, and thanks

[guns1inger]

What software ?

The software should, if it is encoding for widescreen, add black bars. If it doesn't, you would have to do this yourself, however that would also mean encoding an extra time, reducing quality.

If oyu tell us what software you are using, someone here might be able to tell you how to set it up properly, or give you a better alternative

[ICANSEEYOU7687]

its a cucusoft video converter, i dont believe it has those kinds of capabilities. I believe its for people who dont know so much about computers, you open, select your video file, choose what kind of file you wish to convert it to, and hit convert.

i have access to a lot of different type of software, from friends who have it on their computers to the colleges computers, but i currently dont have any software that can do that, and any suggestions would be great, thanks fo rthe reply! and a merry...albeit a day late....christmas!

[guns1inger]

Haven't used it, but looking at the tool section entry for it, I suspect it only does letterbox or stretch, but not 16:9. So you can either choose Keep Aspect Ratio (instead of Stretch to Fit), ot find a better tool.

[dlflannery]

its a cucusoft video converter, i dont believe it has those kinds of capabilities. .........

The CuCuSoft converter in the tools section, which I believe is the one you are using, is not their (new?) Zune Video Converter, which I am trying out right now. So far I really like it. It converts from either DivX (.avi) or MPEG2 to 320x240 .wmv at 768 Kbps at blazing speeds, around 80 frames/sec average on my 3GHz P4 -- it takes advantage of the hyperthreading for 100% CPU usage. It has a choice of profiles and you can vary some of the settings from the standard settings if you desire. Everything it's done for me has played perfectly on my Zune (so far). I'm also free-trialing converters by MovieTaxi and XiliSoft. Both are much slower and both have had problems with some files that the CuCuSoft handled fine. All three programs cost $30 or less.

I convert to .wmv because that's what it's going to be on the Zune anyway. If you sync a mp4 or H264 to the Zune you just have to wait while the Zune PC software converts it to .wmv, which is a long wait. The WMV files tranfer quickly, about 35 secs for a 1 hr video. BTW I've heard the Zune will accept psp files too but since they are another MPEG4 type, you have to wait for the conversion while syncing.

I don't know if this version will solve your problem but you can free-trial it to find out. Let us know how it compares to the one you already have.