Ripping to divx for use in car

[DikkieDick]

Hi,

I can't find it, but I want to do the following: Put as much stuff on a DVD for the kids to use on the portable DVD-player in the car. The screen-resolution is 480x234 pixels, so I thought converting the kids stuff to that format will give it full screen. Unfortunately however, I got large horizontal black bars so that the screen is only filled half. And that with a small screen (7"). BTW. The outputfile has about the same size if I convert to 480x234 or 480x400 or whatever.
In one way or another the aspect-ratio stays the same if I change the settings on the DVD-player (4:3LB, 16:9 or whatever). It's a Mustek-DVD-player.
Converting the DVD (4:3-aspect-ratio) to a divx with 480x400 pixels gives almost a full screen. But I was wondering why it isn't working the way I thought and what the best way is to convert the stuff. I'm using AoA-DVDRipper.

Thanx in advance.

Greetings, Dick

[dchao]

You are like me, I don't like to see huge black borders on small LCD screen either.

I have been doing conversion to my Panasonic portable DVD player (which also has the same res of 480x234) for a while. First I crop the original video to reduce the borders and then resize it to fit the smaller screen.

Here are my settings:

For 2.35:1 DVDs: I first crop the left and right to a final AR of 16:9 and then resize it to 480x272 (this is actually the native PSP display resolution). For example, an anamorphic widescreen NTSC DVD is recorded at 720x480 but get stretched by the player to 854x480, but the area used by actual film is only 854x360. I then crop 107 pixels from both left and right so the result is 640x360 (= 16:9). But for most converters, you need to enter the number of pixel to crop from the source video (which is 720x480), in this case, the crop will be 107x854/720=90

For 4:3 TV and Full-screen movies: I crop the top and bottom to a final AR of 3:2 (to reduce the size of left/right borders - it's a compromise, but don't like people's heads get completely chopped off) and then resize it to 400x272 (= 3:2).

I keep the final resolution as multiple of 16 to achieve the best compression ressult.

Don't worry about the pixel AR of the display, it's not 1:1. Just make sure the cropped video has the correct AR, and then resize. And the DVD player will do the conversion automatically and display correctly on the screen.