Nero Vision 8 letterbox bars too bright

[Davel23]

I recently upgraded to Nero 8, and have used the version of Nero Vision included with it to encode a few 16:9 Divx AVIs to DVD. The quality is fine, the only problem is the letterbox bars at the top and bottom of the image are grey rather than black. And when the movie is wider than 16:9, it will have its own, smaller bars at the top and bottom, those are properly displayed as black. Anyone know what can be done about this, or do I just have to wait for Ahead to issue a patch?

[lordsmurf]

Nero is terrible for working with video. You should use something else. It's low quality and has quirks like this all the time. You're lucky it worked acceptably to begin with.

Nero is burning software. It can burn data rather well, but it sucks with everything else.

Imagine if Baskin Robbins started to sell pizza or hamburgers. That's sort of what Ahead is doing, by making video software. They're dabbling in things they have NO BACKGROUND in, and by no surprise it's really crappy.

[Davel23]

I like it because it's simple, just a few clicks and you've got a DVD ready for playback in a standalone player. But I'm open to alternatives, what would you recommend?

[guns1inger]

If the source files are truly 16:9 then there should not be any black bars.

As for alternatives - FAVC is a far superior encoder. DVD Flick is faster than FAVC and great if you need to join two halves seamlessly.