320 X 240 DIVX to DVD

[The Bog]

I have some 20 min cartoons in DIVX4 320X240. The FPS are standard NTSC, but they files are pretty compact. Only 50 meg per 20 min segment. I read the section 'Best Way To Convert a 320x240 Low Bitrate DivX to VCD' but have a few m ore questions.

For the VCD they left the ration 1:1 and used the standard VCD size of 352X 240.

I would like to watch this on a stand alone DVD player. I tried using TMPGEnc NTSC Low resolution option(352x240) I selected center keep aspect ratio and played around with the bitrate. The output always was average with the character lines a little blury. There is no black box around the picture. It is being "blown up" to fill the tv screen.

I also tried selecting the standard 720x480 option, keep aspect ratio and played around with the bitrate. The output is a much better picture but it only fills half the tv screen. A Huge black border around the picuture. It makes it very small and difficult to watch.

Is there another option? Is this normal to loose a lot of picture quality when you take a smaller source and expand it to 720x240?

Any other options between these extremes?

Thanks for your help

[dvasco]

Are you comparing the Divx on the computer to the VCD on the TV. Two totally different animals. Apples and oranges. Divx has better compresion with better quality. The computer screen is probably less than 19" with .25 mm pitch and you probably don't watch the Divx in fullscreen. You probably watch a the VCD on a 25" to 36" TV with a dot pitch of .8 mm. When going from 320x240 to 720x480 you are adding unnecessary data and with VCD your birate is limited.

"For NTSC, the picture occupies approximately 480 of the 525 scan lines. For broadcasts the portion of a scan line that is visible can hold up to about 440 dots so a grid 480 high by 440 wide represents the maximum amount of picture detail possible. " members.aol.com/ajaynejr/vidres.htm#DotPitch

WitI suggest you use the Tmpgenc wizard and set it to DVD 325x480 and up the bitrate at the highest you feel comfortable with so as not to get too big a file size. Play around with that and let me know how it goes since I just started doing DVD burning, although I have been doing mpeg capture and SVCD burning for a while.