widescreen video conversions to DVD not working

[pglenn]

I have been doing MPG and AVI file conversions to DVD format. I am using TEMPenc and/or DIKO to do the conversions and then DVD-Lab to make the DVD files from the resulting conversion. I have several video files that are "widescreen" formatted but when they are converted to DVD they are still displayed as widescreen when watching but the actual video size has been converted to 720x480 (or 640x480 or whatever). There seem to be top and bottom black borders added to the video. This is apparent if I use a software player, such as PowerDVD, where a "store-bought" widescreen DVD will have the PowerDVD viewer sized in "widescreen" while the "home-made" widescreen DVDs will display in "640x480" (or "720x480" or "704x480" whatever actual size it is).

Is there something that needs to be set in either the conversion or in DVD-Lab to not cause this to happen? or should I not even worry about it? My concern is that the finished product DVD is not a true widescreen video anymore, and will therefore be corrupted/not displayed properly if viewed on a true wide-screen capable TV.

[Baldrick]

Make them widescreen anamorphic(16:9) when you encode them. Set the aspect ratio to 16:9 in tmpgenc...i'm not sure if you can do that in diko. The video should look stretched when you view the converted mpg. After you have authored it should look okey on your software dvd player.

Note that 2.35:1 video will have black borders even if you make them in widescreen anamorphic 16:9 mode.

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https://www.videohelp.com/guides.php?guideid=209&howtoselect=1;3#209