Anamorphic DVD from Widescreen h.264 Video

[trueg]

I have a bunch of wide screen h.264 videos that I would like to make into wide screen DVDs. The final destination is a widescreen TV, so the DVD needs to be anamorphic to take advantage of the full 720x480. I have no problem with the menu which is set to 16:9 and works correctly. The source h.264 video resolution is 720x400. If I let SVCD2DVD detect the aspect ratio, it picks 4:3 and adds black bars to the top and bottom of the video. If I force 16:9, the encoder still adds the black bars before encoding at as anamorphic. The resulting video is squished vertically because of the black bars that have been added to the 16:9 frame.

Is there a hidden setting or something that I can do to correct this issue?

[ChrissyBoy]

Can you post some screenshots to illustrate please? Can you put a sample somewhere for me to look at?

[trueg]

Attached are the following screenshots.....

Menu - correctly set at 16:9
Original - snapshot of the original 720x400 h.264 video
non-forced aspect ratio - snapshot of the encoded video when aspect ratio is not forced to 16:9
16:9 forced aspect ratio - snapshot of encoded video when aspect ratio is forced to 16:9

Ideally I would like the 16:9 aspect ratio without the added black bars.

[trueg]

ChrissyBoy, what type of sample would you like? I can use a HEX editor to grab a chunk of either the original h.264 or encoded VOB.

[ChrissyBoy]

I would like the original mkv file. (makesample in the toosl folder should do the trick). I need enough (duration) to replicate the issue.

[trueg]

I used makesample to make a 5 MB sample of my h.264 mp4 file. Let me know if this is not long enough and we can arrange to transfer a longer sample by another means.

sample.mp4

[trueg]

I think I may have found something.

After posting my sample, I decided to test it using just the sample (instead of the whole file) and found that I no longer had the problem. The resulting video was correctly encoded as anamorphic wide screen. I then tested the whole file and again no problem.

All along I have been using SVCD2DVD to put four 45 minute episodes on a single 4.5 GB DVD-R (using Auto Fit).

After I determined that a single 45 episode encoded correctly, I tried two and again no problems. I was going to try three and decided to jump right to four and noticed that the AVI2MPG line in the log changed.

1 episode: ...AVI2MPG: 9000kbs Full - D1
2 episodes: ...AVI2MPG: 6200kbs Full - D1
3 episodes: ...AVI2MPG: 4000kbs Full - D1
4 episodes: ...AVI2MPG: 2904kbs Half - D1 FS TV

I assume the 'FS' in the last line is what is causing the problem. For some reason AVI2MPG is being told to handle the video as full screen. Am I on the right track?

[trueg]

Any luck ChrissyBoy?

If there was some way to force AVI2MPG to use HALF - D1 instead of HALF - D1 FS TV, I'm sure it would fix the problem.

[ChrissyBoy]

Mmm - that would make sense. Can you post the log from this run please? (radio silence due to holiday BTW...)

[Jikchung]

Any luck ChrissyBoy?

If there was some way to force AVI2MPG to use HALF - D1 instead of HALF - D1 FS TV, I'm sure it would fix the problem.

If I remember correctly...some players will not recognize Half D1 as widescreen/animorphic. You may need to add borders top and bottom (letterbox). That was the old work around.

[trueg]

I suppose that would make sense why it defaults to FS once it drops down to half-D1.

So, what about full D1 at 3 Mbps? It looks great at 4 Mbps with full D1, could 3 Mbps be that much worse?

ChrissyBoy, is there a config setting somewhere where I can lower the threshold of where it switches to half-D1 to say 2.8 Mbps instead of what ever it is now?

[Jikchung]

The results can be quite good depending on what you are viewing on and personal taste. If you want to try full D1 at a lower bitrate this registry hack may still be valid for lowering the bitrate threshold:

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic285195.html#1411554

Note that the registry position is for the older 2.0 version of S2D, adjust accordingly.

[trueg]

Yup, creating a string type registry in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Badger I.T.\SVCD2DVD 2.5 called FULLD1BITRATEMIN with a value of 2500 fixed the problem (not really a problem, more of a feature that I wanted to change).

Thanks for the link Jikchung.

Thank you for originally looking into it for me ChrissyBoy, any plans to work this into a future release?


trueg

[ChrissyBoy]

Well the consensus is that bitrates under 3Mbs warrant half D1 resolution... Hence the setting.

And yes half D1 doesn't support 16:9 Anamorphic (https://www.videohelp.com/dvd):



So you have the info – either reduce the full/half D1 threshold or put less duration on the DVD.

As you say having a setting so that you can change this easily sounds sensible.

Thanks for you patience on getting to the bottom of this.

CB

[trueg]

As a final note, I just wanted to add that in my case, the bit rate for four 45 minute episodes came in at just under 3 Mbps (2950 kbps in most cases, never below 2.9 Mbps). I use CCE medium low 2500-3200 kbps matrices that I downloaded from somewhere around here and the quality is very good (at least as good as the original 250 MB h.264 740x400 videos) on my 1080p Sony 46".