Good Overscan Size for Every TV

[Tekkanano]

What's a good overscan size for almost every TV? I'm going to distribute anime VCD's to my friends. So, what's a really good size to encode in that'll be just about perfect for every TV?

I've used FitCD to calculate it, and it says 336x224, but the vertical sides seems to be off by 12 pixels and the horizontal sides seems to be 2 pixels off on my TV.

[Truman]

As a rule of thumb I suggest to use for VCD 336xXXX (well, it is not macroblock optimized, but 320xXXX might be too much), SVCD 448xXXX and DVD 672xXXX.

[energy80s]

Why are you cutting off part of your picture? Just because your TV overscans too much doesn't mean that someone elses will. Maybe they will view it on a PC.

I would always encode the full picture, you'll never know when you just might need it!

[Truman]

I use to pay attention to the overscan area, because then I save bitrate to the visible image. Since I create SVCD at quite low bitrates (VBR) I have to save as much bits as any possible. These bitrates (1500-1900) are much too low to end with a SVCD, that you can watch on a PC monitor anyway. If I want to watch a movie on PC, I encode to DivX.

[Tekkanano]

Truman, thanks for the suggestion.

energy80s, most important in my case is the anime video has subtitles, so the subtitles would be cut off. Trueman is right too, if you wanted to watch it on your PC, watch it as a divx file than a VCD.

[energy80s]

The beauty of an MPEG encoded file is that you can watch it on anything (unlike a DivX file). I've never seen the point in trying to cut out parts of a picture (or start & end credits), but to each his own!

[Truman]

energy80s, I believe you missunderstand the point. We do not cut out any part of the picture, but resize to a slight smaller picture and add borders arround.

[malducci]

Energy80,

You're not "cutting" out any video, you're just resizing the video to fit with in the picture and not in the overscan. What's the point of making a VCD or SVCD, etc if you can see the whole video. I don't use overscan for SVCD unless I need to save a bit on the bitrate. I do use resizing for overscan on VCD's and CVD unless its letter boxed - then I don't worry about it. My and most other DVD players tend to put too much of the picture into the overscan area - I think this is because VCD's and CVD's use 352 x XXX resolution. SVCD's with 480 x XXX and any DVD's with 704 or 720 x XXX are fine. Well back to my first point, you're not cutting off or out any video - you're resizing the picture to fit the non overscan area of the TV. Of course this doesn't apply to computers.

[zizou108]

Yep,

With my Pioneer DV-333 and oldish big Sony TV, I found I needed to resize my SVCDs to 432*432 (with black borders out to the full SVCD 480*480) in order to see the full picture on my TV. The overscan problem does seem to be worse with SVCDs than with DVDs, I think, and does differ with different TVs, but I like to see the whole frame, so I err on the side of largish black borders.

As someone else noted, this does have the advantage of conserving some bits, too, allowing for better quality in the picture area.

zizou