letterbox went away

[tall guy]

Has anyone ran into problems where the black letterbox mattes went away after burning? Not sure if I'm doing this right but here it goes: I first encode the orginal video (576x240) into a 16:9 video (1280x720). I checked the output and it looks fine, the file property also says 1280x720. I then use MyDVD for burning. Now, I can't find any options in MyDVD for 16:9 but I figured I'll burn it as 4:3 first. My TV has settings for switching between 4:3 and 16:9 so I'll just do it at the TV. But the disc that comes out at the end doesn't have any mattes!! It fills the screen from edge to edge.

For videos that are already 16:9 that's ok, my TV does the adjustment and it looks great. But for something wider like the one above, I ended up with tall and skinny people again. Is this a limitation of MyDVD? Would another app fare better? Or am I missing something along the way?

Thanks!

[Vejita-sama]

You're actually missing quite a lot

First 1280x720? Were did you get/pick this resolution from? True it's 1.77:1 (which is the DAR for widescreen TVs) but what does it have to do with your source?

I think what you want to do is encode an anamorphic DVD. Which should have a resolution of 720x480/576 (I'm surprised you could even author/burn 1280x720). I'm going to use NTSC resolutions for this (because it's easier for me to type without double checking, just change 480 to 576 as needed).

There seems to be a lot of confusion about all this works Take a look at:

http://www.thedigitalbits.com/articles/anamorphic/aspectratios/widescreenorama.html

http://www.doom9.org/aspectratios.htm

for more info. But here's the basic idea.

There are several display aspect ratios (DAR) out there. But most people only work with three:

1:1 PC
4:3 TV
16:9 movies and widescreen TVs

ALL PC video has a DAR of 1:1 (aside - this is why for divx sources you should choose 1:1 VGA in TMPGenc). For PC video the DAR = resolution. But this is NOT true for TV or film. In fact you can have any DAR at any resolution (although not always using the full screen, ie. might have to letterbox - see below).

TVs were made to display 4:3 video, and only 4:3 video. Now most (new) movies are shot at 16:9. However, under the 16:9 flag there are several ratios:

1.85:1 - academy flat
2.35:1 - anamorphic widescreen
1.77:1 - widescreen TVs

To show a 16:9 movie on your 4:3 TV is NOT possible. You're TV can only display 4:3 video. So we need to convert the 16:9 movie, into a 4:3 movie. There are two ways to do this

Full screen - we cut out part of the video (normally a little from the left and right sides of the screen), so that the remaining video has a DAR of 4:3. This is less than ideal as we lose part of the picture, so along came...

Letterboxing - we squeeze the picture and add black bars at the top and bottom to fill up the 'unused space' creating a _NEW 4:3 video_. The source might have been 16:9 but the letterboxed video is now 4:3!

Most 'movie buffs' prefer letterboxing as you perserve the entire movie screen. Some people think it 'looks ugly' and want to 'use the whole screen.' Take a look at the wide screen o-rama link for why this isn't a good idea.

At any rate, letterboxing worked fine for VHS/LD. But with drop in price of widescreen TVs and HDTV (which is normally widescreen) also being 'the wave of the future' a problem occurred.

If you display a 4:3 video on a widescreen TV, in order to maintain the original DAR you have to add black bars to the left/right of the screen. But most videos (eg. VHS) on the market are 4:3 letterboxed movies. That means when you play them on a widescreen TV you get black bars on the left/right (as it's a 4:3 video) and the top/bottom (the letterboxing itself). So your movie shows up in a cube. Plus since widescreen TVs have a DAR of 16:9 why box anything.

So the result was you had to produce two videos. 1) letterboxed 4:3 video for standard TVs. 2) a widescreen edition for widescreen TVs (for the most part only produced in Europe).

DVD (ie. digital) changed all that. Now movies are encoded at 720x480 and flagged as either 4:3 or 16:9. If you try to play a 16:9 flagged DVD on your standard TV, the DVD player adds the letterboxing on the fly. If you try to play a 16:9 flagged DVD on a widescreen TV, the DVD player does nothing. Hence you have an anamorphic DVD.

So if the movie is flagged as 4:3 OR flagged as 16:9, it's still encoded at 720x480. Ok now to your actually question. I don't know what you are trying to do? But it sounds like you want to rip a DVD9, re-encode at a lower bitrate, then re-author to everything on a DVDR for backup. If so then you need an authoring program that supports adding 16:9 flags.

Sorry for the long post but I hope this helps clear up some confusion.