Damn U DVD Studio Pro! Widescreen DVD Playback on 4:3 Monitors

[TRAK]

Hi there,
I have recently come across a problem that has me stumped.

I'm authoring a dvd which has two separate videos. One is 4:3, and the other is Anamorphic Widescreen. Both encoded correctly.

Im using DVD Studio Pro 3, and have managed to get my head around how the settings I need to enable a correct displaying of the content on either Widescreen TVs or 4:3 TVs (Letterboxing the widescreen footage).

However, I have noticed that after burning the DVD, and testing it on a dvd player and 4:3 monitor, the widescreen footage is displayed incorrectly. It is not letterboxed.

I chased the problem to the apple website, but all they had to say about it was "some DVD players may not display widescreen DVDs (created in DVD Studio Pro or iDVD 5) in the correct letterbox presentation on a 4:3 TV or monitor." See: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301840

Why is this? What versions of the program does this problem apply to? and if it's all versions, is there an alternative program I can use (on MAC), that wont have the same problem?

Because this DVD is intended for public release, is there anyway to make certain all TVs/players will display the footage correctly?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Trak

[turk690]

AFAIK, DVD authoring programs have little to do with the widescreen set flag. This is put on the elementary video stream when it is encoded (you check the appropriate box), & (hopefully) remains as such all through authoring. After encoding to MPEG, you can test the *.m2v by using Windows Media Player; if it is widescreen and set as such, it will display correctly. If it's not set as widescreen WMP plays it 4:3.
The other half of the story is the DVD player. All DVD players I've come across have their outputs set for a 16:9 TV by default. You should set it to 4:3 pan&scan or letterbox if connected to a 4:3 TV otherwise genuine 16:9 material will NOT be played with added black bars top & bottom.

[guns1inger]

There are two parts to correct widescreen authoring. The first is to encode the material as 16:9 so that the video stream is flagged correctly. The second is to author as 16:9 so that that the IFOs are set correctly. For full compliance, both need to be done. Some players will playback widescreen correctly if the IFO are wrong but the video is right, and some won't.

Secondly, if you have 16:9 and 4:3 material on the same disc, they must be in separate VTS' to display correctly, as each VTS can only have one aspect ratio. If you put both a 16:9 and a 4:3 title in the same VTS, one of them will display incorrectly.