aspect ratio question

[keith2045]

I have a widescreen lcd conncected to my computer.

When i play 1.85 aspect ratio dvds, i dont have any black bars on my tv, great. But when i ripped those dvds and kept the 1.85 aspect ratio, i have black bars. Why?

I'm using this tut to encode my videos http://www.bobsomers.com/articles/encoding-dvds-to-high-quality-movie-files-with-xvid-and-ac3-1/

[Cornucopia]

My answer: stop using tutorials like that that are general purpose and don't always cover all the specifics needed in special cases (like yours). Learn why things are done, then you can use whatever tools you find appropriate for the job.

That tute said to resize down to something like 720x346 for a 1.85 DAR (assuming square pixels), but your original isn't that size.

(Side Note: your original DVD may show a visible picture DAR of 1.85:1, but you must remember that ALL DVD's must use either 4:3 <aka 1.33:1> or 16:9 <aka 1.78:1> as their setting. So your original must have had SOME black at top/bottom)

You could have even more appropriately have just re-encoded the video from 720x480 (Anamorphic 16:9DAR) MPEG2 on DVD, to 720x480 (Anamorphic 16:9DAR) MPEG4 (aka Xvid/Divx/etc.) on Disc.
There IS an AR setting you can change. That way, you're not sizing down and you're not wasting bits either.

Otherwise, I don't know what you could be doing wrong. You'd have to iterate all your steps in detail...

Scott

[manono]

Yeah, I took a quick look at that tutorial and quickly realized the guy was incompetent when he mentioned on the first page resizing a 2.35:1 movie to 720×306. 306 is only Mod2, and he broke a really basic Mod16 resizing rule. He's also teaching the use of a VFAPI, something that was obsolete 5 years ago, and is slow and produces inferior results to boot.

How are you playing the original DVD, on a standalone, or also through the computer to the widescreen TV set? The reason I ask is that you'll get overscan using the standalone (i. e., no black bars). If you're playing only the AVI through the computer to the TV, then no overscan, and some very small amount of black bars will be added above and below to maintain AR. Either that or your vid card just isn't set up properly to output to the widescreen TV. That is, there's a chance you didn't do anything wrong with the encoding (except to follow that guy's guide).

But you didn't really provide a whole lot of info, and as Cornucopia suggests, detailing everything you did might help. What's the resolution of this AVI? Did you make it 720x390 as the guide suggests (390 also being only Mod2)? If you're not sure, open it in GKnot and find out.