CVD aspect ratio questions

[therick]

Alright, like many on this site I am making CVDs from not only my VHS tapes, but from DVD rips and sat. captures as well. My goal for these movies is to eventually put them on DVD and have a massive collection of 2 movie DVDs . The other day as I looked over the web and contemplated my first HDTV purchase I thought for the first time how these CVDs were going to look on a 16:9 digital set and I realized something-that I might have an aspect ratio problem on a 16:9 set.

here is a DVD rip (unchanged):



here is the way I have been making my CVDs:



Now I have never had the pleasure to fiddle with one of these sets, and I have heard people mention "zooming" with them, which I guess is simply zooming in the image...I am not sure. But it seems that if I want my CVDs to look correct on an HDTV (without the need of any special settings on the TV) I should be making my encodes look like this:



This is really just conjecture, but could someone with a widescreen (or HDTV) set clear this up for me so that I can optimize my future encodes for my future TV? Thanks in advance.

[LeeBear]

From my experience with a Panasonic RP62 player and a Toshiba 16x9 television the aspect ratio you choose depends on the TV you plan to watch it on (4x3 or 16x9). When you compress to MPEG you can set the DAR flag to either 4x3 or 16x9 ratio. What this does is basically scales the MPEG to the desire ratio regardless of the action resolution. For example if you choose 4x3 ratio and encode at 352x240, 352x480, or 480x480 what you see on the TV will all be in the correct ratio, the only difference will be you'll have a clearer picture with the higher resolution.

So the answer to your question would be to encode your CVD's using a DAR ratio of 16x9. That way it'll look perfect on your widescreen TV without any special settings. But the downside to this is if you watch the same disc on a normal 4x3 TV everything will look squeezed because most players ignore the DAR flag.

Personally I encode my rips to letterbox 4x3 using a resolution of 480x480, and just use the TV's theatre (or zoom) mode which basically takes out the black bars. It's a little inconvient but it'll make your disc compatible with 4x3 tv's.

-Lee

[therick]

thanks LeeBear! If there is no quality decrease I will simply keep my encodes the same...thanks again...

[kinneera]

I'm not sure what you mean by it looking incorrect - are you saying you don't think it should have the black bars or that there seems to be some type of distortion?

If it has to do with the black bars, one thing to keep in mind is that even some DVD's are encoded at 2.35:1 which means there will still be some letterboxing. If it's distortion, I'm not sure I'm seeing what you're seeing.

Also keep in mind that 16:9 is not actually supported by SVCD/CVD/VCD, so if you want to maintain compatibility, you will want to use a zooming feature. It was my impression that many widescreen TVs have automatic settings for this, since it's known that many people will have substantial existing collections of 4:3 material.

[therick]

I had heard about the zooming thing, but I didn't know that it was automatic or that it looks good. I guess I should have known that they would make concessions for large collecetions of 4:3 material, I just have never gotten to play with one of these sets. Thanks