PAL anamorphic DVD to VCD (without botching aspect ratio)???

[Werner Von Wallenrod]

The title tells the story of my dilemma pretty well, actually.
I've got an anamorphic PAL DVD (actually, two) and one of those Sampo DVD players that won't convert the anamorphic picture to my NTSC properly... So I want to burn it onto a plain, good ol' fashioned NTSC VCD, so I can watch it without the picture being all skewed.
I've gone through all the guides here, and searched the forums, but haven't had any luck finding something that address this specific problem - the problem being that I can't seem to get it onto a DVD without botching the aspect ratio all up (though I have a feeling it's probably pretty easy with, say, DVDx if I had a better grasp of what I was doing).
Can anyone help with this at all? Is it just a matter of putting the correct resolution and zoom in the output settings? If so, what IS the correct resolution & zoom?
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated... I've been stuck on this for a while, and you can imagine how frustrating it can get.

...Oh, and it has to have subtitles.

[KingJohn]

You mentioned Dvdx as one of the program you use, on the output you can select different aspect ratios, if your DVD/TV is producing black borders at the top and bottom on the "original DVD" then that's how its going to look when you make another, unless you stretch things.

The output on DvdX can be changed from full screen to Letterbox or 16:9/4:3 and you can see the results as soon as you do it. You can also use the custom size to experiment. You may never achieve the result you want without stretching or loosing part of the movie sides.

You can also load a VOB into TMPGEnc, so long as you have PowerDVD installed on your system for the codec, then you can also experiment with the crop size and full screen > keep aspect ratio.

I usually convert them to 16:9 instead of the letterbox, although this still gives black borders.

[Werner Von Wallenrod]

Thanks for answering, but I don't think I'm quite out of the doghouse yet...
I've been selecting different aspect ratios, but I can't find one that doesn't shrink the picture, crop the picture, or just stretch it like a funhouse mirror.
I can't find the right combo of (and, believe me, I've been trying for a while). Whenever I seem to be getting close to the correct aspect ratio, the whole picture shrinks (black bars on all four sides).
I've been guessing at numbers to stick in the Resolution boxes, but I don't even know where I want the Zoom to be at, if I were to guess the right numbers... If the movie is 1.85:1, anamorphic, PAL, and I want to preserve the widescreen ratio (for just a regular, non 16x9 TV, I mean), do I want to zoom on "None (Letterbox 4/3)" or "Full (16/9 4/3 input)" (I assume I definitely don't want "Medium," "Pan Scan" or "Custom")?
Thanks, again!