Another "black bars" question for the experts

[Kdiddy]

Yeah before you ride my a$$, I searched, but didnt come up what up idea/answer through the last 3 months of posts.. n e waze..

I was wondering if TMPG encodes first, then resizes??

The reason I ask, is that I am in the minority group of people who prefer to keep the "black bars" instead of stretching a 16:9 to fit my whole 4:3 TV. However I noticed, that if I clip the "black bars", when there are some, with DVD2AVI, encode using TMPG with the "full screen (keep aspect ratio), that the "new" black bars I do get are true/very black, basically like it is black being projected by my DVD player/TV...whereas with CCE method (tmpg project->vfapi->CCE) I get "off black", like it has been encoded. I tried the addborders through AVIsynth, but my result was a picture that had 80 million zig-zag lines?? lemme know what I did wrong there.

So, again my question is how does TMPG produce/treat the black bars when the source video has none??

[vitualis]

I don't know for sure, but I would presume that TMPGEnc would have to have the source created BEFORE encoding to MPEG because of simply how MPEG works.

Perhaps TMPGEnc simply handles large black areas of the screen better than CCE.

Regards.

[Kdiddy]

hmmmm...

[Hateslife]

Try frameserving with VFAPI to Virtualdub, then use Virtualdub to do the resize... Before I knew TMPGenc dould do resizing well, I had good results with this technique.

It never ceases to surprise me how well big black bars compress without wasting bitrate.

[TIbrO]

But... I read one of the articles at doom9 or someplace that I linked to from here one night when I was bored, and I read about how there are like flags in the MPEG stream that can be used to control the output, and that there are indeed no black bars ever encoded, but depending on your DVD Player's settings and TV type, you will see them or not see them on playback.

I would paste the link to the exact page where I read all of this, but the server seems to be down or something, so I cannot browse their site to get the hyperlink, and I can't remember it.

[Kdiddy]

Yeah I thought I remembered reading something like that on Doom9 as well but couldnt find it either...LOL

[TIbrO]

Aha!!
http://www.doom9.org/aspectratios.htm
w00t!
Enjoy...

[Kdiddy]

Yep thats where I saw it, so it doesnt encode the black, thereby allowing more bits..hmmm now a reason to switch back to TMPG...or at least for that style of encoding..hmmm