Ye Olde vhs letterbox to 16:9 question - where is it in avstodvd for 16:9?

[yoda313]

Ok here is the question. I have what appears to be a near pristine vhs retail tape of a movie in widescreen and I'm dubbing it to h264 with my hdpvr right now.

I want to make a dvd of it. I want to use avstodvd so I can batch encode (I have almost a dozen movies capped that I want to start setting up for conversion. This is the only letterbox tape so far - I have three other letterbox tapes but I have all of those on store bought dvd in widescreen so I don't need to transfer those.

I've been through the preferences list in avstodvd quite a bit and don't see an option to flag it 16:9. There are resize options but I've never used those so I'm going blind with those settings.

Yes I do have zoom functions on my hdtv to auto-zoom a letterboxed video. However since I am going to be encoding from h264 to mpg2 anyway I would like to do this properly before I make the dvd in the first place.

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Now if I can't manually set 16:9 in avstodvd can I do this in hcenc or quenc? I can do it outside of avstodvd if that is the best option available.

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There are lancos resies and spline resize options in the setup but I don't know what those are. Do any relate to letterbox to 16:9 widescreen encoding?

Thanks for your help.

[davexnet]

AVStoDVD can do it. Find out how many pixels of black you have, top and bottom.
Load the file and edit title. On the video tab, select 16/9,
On the Avisynth tab, deselect the "auto" setting and select crop. It will give you and opportunity to
enter your numbers, top and bottom. When the numbers are entered the Avisynth script will be
updated to reflect the new perspective. Encode as usual.

[yoda313]

Find out how many pixels of black you have, top and bottom.

Thanks for the information. I have found the other settings you mentioned in avstodvd - to date I've only used it for the preset basics (and some were recorded in 16/9 so it was already set).

So what is the best way to count the pixels? I don't remember doing that before.

Also for left and right I should leave it at 0 so encodes the full width of the video correct?

Edit - Thanks I have found out how to get the pixels. Since it was an h264 m2ts file I created an avs file with virtualdub so I could load it into tmpgenc plus - now that I think about it virtualdub must have a crop feature itself. But inside tmpgenc plus I did the crop feature. Once I got the display I incremenatally made it get rid of the black bars and got 98 for the top and 103 for the bottom - at least as close as I was comfortable going - I didn't want to risk shearing off too much if I was too close.

I'll finish setting up my project file and create more batches for my job list so I can encode a bunch of caps.

Thanks a lot davexnet! I appreciate the assistance.

[davexnet]

You're welcome . As you implied, it's also simple to do it in Virtualdub.
Open the file and use the Null Transform filter /crop button.

I must admit, I like AVStoDVD myself - knowing some of these little tricks certainly helps!

[yoda313]

Ok I had some trouble getting it to encode last night. I was able to get a completed encode today. I'm burning the dvd now. It is FANTASTIC!

Check for yourself:

[img]airforceonewide.jpg[/img]

[img]airforcewide.jpg[/img]



I did end up buying the widescreen version of Air Force One at the book sale after all and it seems to be in perfect shape.

Its obviously not as sharp as a real dvd print would be but I'm thrilled with the vhs transfer.

Thanks a lot davexnet. This was great. Now if only I get a hold of more widescreen vhs movies this would be a perfect transfer option. As I said earlier I do have a few other widescreen vhs tapes but I already have them on printed official dvds in widescreen so I don't need to transfer those.

[davexnet]

Yeah looks good - glad to help. As you say, your source is a little soft compared to a real DVD.
In the preferences, Spline64resize (resize option) is usually used for the upscale because it
mitigates (somewhat) the lack of sharpness.

[yoda313]

Spline64resize (resize option) is usually used for the upscale because it
mitigates (somewhat) the lack of sharpness.

Thanks. I'll try to keep that in mind.

I'm not sure why the two snapshots are different in width. Both were taken with mpchc. It could be that I took one from the original capture file and the other was off the dvd folder after conversion - don't know for sure.

But the dvd plays just fine in the proper proportion so that is all that matters. Thanks again.

All the rest of my caps are full screen so I'll just be using the defaults on those conversions.