Problems with aspect ratios

[Smiffy_]

Hi there, I'm having some problems with aspect ratios when played back on my standalone player. Here's what I'm trying to do:

I have a divX movie clip at 640x272 (1:2.375) 25fps. I'm converting it to an xSVCD (720x576, 4000kbps CBR) using TMPGEnc. My TV set is a standard 4:3, but it's likely that the xSVCD will be played on a 16:9 TV also. As a test, in TMPGEnc I encoded the clip twice, one with 4:3DAR and once with 16:9DAR (both with "Full screen maintain aspect ratio" set).

I then burnt the clips to cd and tested. On a 4:3 TV set only the 4:3DAR encoding works, the 16:9DAR version was squashed (people look thin) and bits were missing on the left and right of the image.
However, on a 16:9 TV set, both worked fine, but the 16:9 DAR encoding had much better quality as the image took up more of the vertical resolution when encoded.

Here's what I was expecting though (I'll explain with an example): I have "The Shawshank Redemption" on DVD, and one side of the DVD has the film at 16:9 DAR, so that when played on a 16:9 TV it appears as it should, but on a 4:3 TV set letter boxing is added to maintain the correct aspect ratio. This is what I was expecting my SVCD to do.

How come it doesn't? Is there a way of doing this in TMPGEnc?
Thanks in advance for any help and suggestions.
Craig.

[Smiffy_]

OK, After a bit of research I've discovered the following:

1. All SVCDs (even standard compliant ones) play with about 20-30 pixels cropped off at either side on my TV, not sure if this is just my TV or all TVs, not had time to test on other TVs. Does your TV do this?

2. I found the system setup menu on my DVD player (Mustek V560) which allows me to select TV type of: "4:3 PS", "4:3 LB" or "16:9". With a DVD this alters the picture, but has no effect on SVCDs. I found somewhere on the internet that SVCDs cannot be letter-boxed on the fly. Is this true? If so, would burning the MPEG-2 file as a DVD-R (after resampling the audio to 48k) allow a 16:9 encoding be displayed with letter-boxing?

Thanks.