Mainconcept Encoder Not Giving Much DVD Standard Resolutions

[johnharlin]

I just saved a 1 hour and 15 minute video
on my computer with the ATI all in Wonder 128 card. I saved it in the Longest Time option MPEG-2 640x 240 NTSC (525)
2.00 M Bit/Second. 22.050 KHz, 16 bit stero.

I then wanted to encode the film with the Mainconcept encoder but I noticed that the options I wanted to encode in were not the DVD standard options. I thought that using an encoder like Mainconcept would give options to change it to the DVD Standard resolution.
The MPEG 2 option to encode in Mainconcept says 640 x 240.

Why doesn't it give me a DVD standard option closest to 640 by 240 which would be 704 x 480 pixels MPEG2.

I thought that encoding in DVD standard resolution options were part of the encoding process. Same thing goes for the MPEG1 option in Mainconcept. It only gives the DVD nonstandard 640 x 240. The VCD options does give the standard of 352 x 240 but I would have preferred to have a higher quality for this movie. Plus I'm not really sure I want to have films lower than VHS quality as I was informed VCD is.

The SVCD option in Mainconcept also only gives a non DVD standard resolution of 480 x 480. The DVD option gives the standard 720 x 480 but I don't want to go that high because of needing too much file space and my limited 4gig per file fat32 file size limit plus it would make no sense since a video from a cassette cannot be improved to DVD quality.

I went ahead and ran the encoder anyway at SVCD 480 x 480 hoping that maybe later on I could somehow do something about the resolution and make it DVD standard. Is there some way I can now change the resolution to the DVD standard.

Somehow I'm just not getting something about changing the resolution to the DVD standards because I really thought the encoder would give me that option to do so because I thought that was the encoder's purpose.

[reboot]

Enlarging the aspect ratio from 640x240 to dvd standard of 720x480 will not increase filesize, however, it may disrupt quality because of the larger pixel size. I would suggest you encode it to half D1, that is 352x480. That will play in 99% of all players.
Select the DVD template in Mainconcept, Audio Mode set to Layer 2, click Details, and drop the width to 352, leaving height at 480.
Optionally, just encode it to 720x480, or encode it at 352x240.
Burn it to DVDRW to test it.

[johnharlin]

Thanks for the expert advice. I'm going to begin encoding it to 352 by 480 right now. I do wonder why rendering to 352 by 480 would be better than rendering to 704 x 480 pixels MPEG2 from the original 640 by 240 pixels mpeg2

[lordsmurf]

x240 = deinterlaced ... yuck

[Gurm]

Two things:

1. All you have to do in Mainconcept is pull down "DVD" instead of "MPEG2". Edit: Looks like you already found that out!

2. The reason 352x480 is better is... well, 640x240 is... uhh... I dunno, six of one, half a dozen of the other. MPEG re-encodes are 2-dimensional, so having more horizontal data CAN improve encodes, so I suppose that it's not BAD to go to 352x480. But honestly you should probably just go to 704x480 with black bars.

[reboot]

Doesn't matter what aspect you choose in Mainconcept, it will letterbox it (put in black bars) if needed to keep the video in the correct aspect.