Overscan and DivX

[JMJ2500]

My Zenith Tv is about 15 years old. Despite my numerous tries, I cannot seem to fix my overscan issue. However, if I play it in my modified XBox with XBMC (XBox Media Center) then I am able to watch it as I can adjust the actual picture size. My question is this: If I were to buy a Dvd player that has DivX playback, would I still be getting the same issue if I just made a DivX dvd and played it? Also, what is a good player with DivX playback capabilities?

[jman98]

Unfortunately, almost every TV and DVD player have overscan issues. In theory this is fixable by provided an un-zoom type option on DVD players, but almost no models have this. Most manufacturers seem to think that it's not very important. TVs do overscan because a lot of customers would bitch like nothing you've ever heard before if they saw some of the weird things that can happen on the outer edges of video, so everyone just makes their TVs overscan so they don't have to hear bitching about how the TV is "broken" when in fact it's fine, it's just a normal issue with video. Since almost no DVD players can un-zoom or underscan, any player you buy that supports Divx will probably have this issue.

Be warned that the following Divx setting are sometimes problematic for Divx playback on standalones. Some players may not care about these, but many do. For best compatibility you should generally avoid:
1) QPel (Quarter pixel)
2) GMC
3) Resolutions greater than 720x576
4) Packed bitstream
5) Video bitrates greater than 2000 Kbps
Philips makes some cheap players that support Divx fairly well, although if you pay more for another brand you might get a better machine. Philips has had serious quality control problems with some models in the past.

[JMJ2500]

Thanks for your quick reply.

As far as the setting you mentioned, I am not very knowledgable in Dvd authoring. I have been attempting to use Nero Vision 7, but I also tried using the FitCD Guide that was posted on this site. Past attempts with FitCD, CCE, and whatnot have given my audio sync issues and after awhile I got fed up and stopped messing with this all together.

I suppose that I can live with watching them on my computer or XBMC, its not a big deal but I was just going to try once more for old times sake.

Thanks for the info

[jman98]

If you have audio sync issues when using CCE, are you using it to encode audio? You really should only use CCE for video encoding and use something else, such as BeSweet GUI, for audio encoding. CCE can, in theory, encode audio, but nobody uses it for such because it does a really poor job.

[JMJ2500]

No, I was only using CCE to encode the video, I was using BeSweet GUI for the audio. I probably had something that was incorrect, but by that point I was simply fed up with trying.