Capturing in widescreen?

[chuffy]

Wonder if any of you more experienced users can help me here,
ive been using the hauppage wintv software with the usb1 pvr unit to capture vids with reasonable success for a year. The prob is they are all in 4:3 format and ive just got hold of a nice widescreen lcd and would like to know if its possible to capture in widescreen format.

Where am i going wrong? does the wintv haup software even support 16:9 ? if not is the pinnacle pctv deluxe any better?

Please someone help me cos im at a bit of a loss

[petar]

I don't think a capturing device can capture in widescreen. Analogue video is always 4:3 (even when it's widescreen, it's letterboxed in 4:3 with black bars) and that's what you capture. Maybe there are some capturing devices that can capture the signal and then chop off the top and the bottom on-the-fly but I'm not aware of any.

If you want widescreen crop 60/72 lines (NTSC/PAL) from top and bottom and flag the video as 16:9. The video will look stretched but the player will display it properly.

[chuffy]

Ah right , thats why ive never seen the option then

so how do i *crop* the mpegs down to size .. any particular program i need?

thanks for your help

[petar]

I use TMPGEnc. It can crop and resize too so I use it for editing and encoding. If your encoding application can't crop and resize frameserve with VirtualDub or AviSynth or with whatever editing application you use (if it supports frameserving).

With TMPGEnc it's very easy. Under advanced you have a "clip frame" option. Doble-click on it and you can crop there. Then set the "video arrange method" to full screen so that it stretches the video vertically. Finally under "video" set the aspect ratio to 16:9. This will tell the player that it's widescreen so it will display it properly.

All this assuming your original analog video is letterboxed and you're cropping black bars. Otherwise there's not much point because you'll be cropping part of the picture.