AVI/MPG to DVD Conversion Questions

[Ianboots]

I have some avi and mpg files that are in wide screen, I have been using VSO Divx to DVD converter to convert them so I can burn them to disk or Cucusoft Converter. I have played around with apect etc to try and get them from wide screen to full screen. Is it possible to do this? Is it possible to crop them so as they will be full screen and still keep it all in proportion? Is there any other software that will allow me to do this? I have done a fair bit of reading but keep getting different answers that send me in the wrong direction. Any help that you can give me would be great.

Thanks Ian

[steptoe]

There may be a way around converting widescreen to non-widescreen I'm looking into trying out, but it won't be simple

It involves using AVISynth and frameserving to whatever encoder (CCE seems to be the best choice here) and using a plug-in called autocrop that detects the black edges and removes them for you, if you try and crop using other softwrae you will literally just crop the source without touching the black bars you need to remove

VirtualDub also supports frameserving and other software can be fooled into accepting frameserving


Its not simple if you have never played with frameserving as I'm still getting to grips with it all, and avisynth is not very user friendly as its all run via scripts, but is very very powerful in what can be done, and all this takes time

[jimmalenko]

Any encoder can do it, but the problem you will face is choosing exactly which part of the screen to crop in order to get the aspect ratio right without making people look skinny - AFAIK when the Movie Studios produce Full Screen (4:3) movies, they have a "joystick" thingy so that they can move the screen from side to side so that the action in the frame is in focus, resulting in minor details to the sides of the frame that are visible in the widescreen edition being cut off in the fullscreen edition. Obviously this would take considerable time to do one frame at a time, like any "amateur" would have to do.

IMHO you're better off just leaving them widescreen.