divX 2 MPG1/2 full screen?!?

[h00ter]

Hi all
I'm decoding movies on a regular basis for some time now and quite happy with the results, I'm converting files to MPG1/2 for VCD/SVCD and it looks great on my DVD player, This site helped me a lot when I started so thanks again
I have a little problem with the panorama (those black stripes at the top and bottom of the screen). When I converting an AVI file into MPG1 or 2 to watch on my DVD player the panorama is using like one third of the screen, it even has a slight bigger panorama then the original AVI file. Now its quite a bummer to dedicate so much time to put subtitles and converting sound formats and then decoding to view a movie
On just two third of the screen…
Most of AVI files on the net has there own panorama, its very hard to find a file that uses full screen but how can I reduce panorama when I convert it to MPG? Is there a way?
I'm using TMPGEinc to convert files, now I'm always using function: Full Screen (keep accept ratio) so that the picture wont get distorted. When I tried the full screen function the result was that TMPGE starches the movie all over screen and completely distort it.
So can I get a lower panorama with TMPGE or any other software ? how can I reduce it? Please help me out here

Another last question on the same issue is can I put subtitles on the panorama instead of on the movie? (if I can only watch a movie on two third of the screen I rather the
subtitles wont take more place than its have to
Any info and help well be thank 4

[Gazorgan]

What I have done is pretty straight forward. You can (in order or it doesn't work) crop off the black bars, crop off some of the sides (varies with size and aspect ratio), resize, add black bars for padding to correct VCD/SVCD size. This works for VDUB or AVISynth.

Some AVI's are really flat, as in 640x288. If you just resize this it becomes 480x218(viewable) which means 1/2 your vertical resolution is gone. Actually these never convert well to full screen. My way usually let's you get at least 80% of the vertical resolution without looking too blocky. It's so much easier to backup my own DVD's.

[h00ter]

Thanks for replying Gazorgan 8)
I didn’t quite follow you though, sorry ..
How can I crop a divx file? Those AVI files looks just great in Virtualdub when I open them (the divx files themselves doesn't have panorama it just adds to them by players like Windows Media , RealOne when you display it I think…) no place for cropping
The problem is at the end of the process when TMPGEinc adds those bars as the aspect ratio…
I can of course use FlaskMPG to crop a MPG file but taking the VCD/SVCD through another compression will lose any quality left (not to mention Flask just sucks with subs) and it also means dabble time..
But trying to get some more help from around the net leads me to another idea, Maybe u can comet on that or tell me if its possible to make the AVI file itself more square before I send it to through the process of compression for VCD .
For example if I have a divx file 576 x 304 it there a way to make it somewhere close to 304 x 304? (life can be beautiful that way )
I went to Divx.com and found the article "Resizing with Correct Aspect Ratio" at: http://www.divx.com/support/guides/guide.php?gid=12
some helpful stuff, but I just cant work it up.
They got aspect ratio numbers for all common sizes of AVI but I just cant find A place in tmpg or virtualdub to change ratio to a custom one.