My burned DVDs are zoomed in

[soc_hexum]

I've finally found a way to burn my divx episodes to a DVD.

I used a really great program called ConvertXtoDvd.

Everything seems perfect, except when I pop the DVD into a standalone DVD player in my house, the video is zoomed in a bit. It zooms the exact same amount on both my standalone DVD players (they do not have the "zoom" option on, they are set up just fine, they dont zoom for any other DVDs other than the ones I've burned).

The DVDs play perfectly (not-zoomed in) on both my PCs using windows media player.

I'm finding it weird that these DVDs play fine on my PC, but in my standalones they are zoomed in. The standalones are totally different brands (panasonic/no-name) from totally different years (2 years ago/old as dirt).

How could this be? And any ideas how to fix it? Is this program no good?

[MysticE]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan

[jagabo]

Televisions overscan by design. Everything you have ever watched on TV has had a bit of the edges cut off by the bezel around the tube. You never noticed before because you didn't have an external reference to see where the edge of the picture really was.

If you have subtitles that are being cut off by the overscan there are a thousand threads here that cover ways of getting around that.

[soc_hexum]

I don't need an external reference to see this zooming though.. peoples bodies are being cut off at the right side, and text written at the bottom of the screen is chopped in half too. It's quite a "zoom".

I should mention too, that the zoom is not centered. The top and left sides of the picture are fine... aligned properly... it's the right side of the picture and the bottom that are missing a strip.

In effect, anything that is usually in the center of the screen, is now a little to the right and down, due to the zoom. It's like it is zoomed up and to the left...

[jagabo]

Overscan is usually not even on all sides. In fact, that's why it exists. Analog televisions have a hard time keeping the image centered and the correct size. A 5 to 10 percent overscan on any or all sides is normal.

That said, it's possible you have a conversion problem in addition to the normal overscan. Download an overscan test image like this one:

http://www.cinedrome.ch/hometheater/testpatterns/overscan.html

make a DVD video from it and see how much is getting cut off.

Or upload a sample frame from your video and indicate how much your TV is cutting off. Any of several people here will be able to tell you if it's normal or not.

[theewizard]

you didn't say is the source wide screen 16:9

if you didn't set the aspect to 16:9 in convertx, it may have defaulted to 4:3

this would give a zoomed in look from a dvd player

both wide screen and standard TV - dvds have the same number of pixels, 720*480

it is the aspect ratio setting that tells the dvd player how to display the video

however the off set you are describing makes me wonder if its possible that you have encoded it at 740*576 pal but displaying it on an ntsc TV that only shows 740*480

I don't know if its even possible to do that, only that there are players that will play both formats

[soc_hexum]

The source is 4:3, and I'm encoding to 4:3

The source is NTSC, and I'm encoding to NTSC

Here are the test image results:

A = 0
B = 7.5
C = 7.5
D = 7.5
E = 7.5
F = 7.5
G = 0
H = 0

The cross in the center appears down and to the right of center.

Here's the thing: I have an original DVD that a friend sent to me in the mail. When I put this original DVD in the standalone DVD player, it's perfect. When I make a dixv from the original DVD that my friend mailed me, it's perfect, been doing it for years. But when I encode and burn the divx that I made, only my PCs will play the DVD without missing strips from the right and bottom sides. The standalones both cut off strips of video on the right and bottom sides.

So what I have here is 2 DVDs. The original one that my friend sent me, and my new one that I made from a divx of the original (the divx version is perfect). The original is not missing any strips of video. So that leads me to believe that this isn't just normal overscan here.

[psx_pirate]

why not just do a backup of the original dvd using imgburn iso read > iso write ... seems pointless ripping to divx and then reconverting to dvd when its not needed ... making a direct backup will also prevent the video quality from suffering which it will if you rip to divx and then convert back to dvd

[soc_hexum]

I know that PSX_pirate, it's just that in some cases, I do not have an original DVD. Just a divx file.

[MysticE]

The source is 4:3, and I'm encoding to 4:3

The source is NTSC, and I'm encoding to NTSC

Here are the test image results:

A = 0
B = 7.5
C = 7.5
D = 7.5
E = 7.5
F = 7.5
G = 0
H = 0

That original image looks off.

Try this file (4:3), unzip and burn. Although not perfect it seems better than the other. The outer red rectangle is about 10% smaller. It should provide some sort of a reference point at least as far as centering. On my older set it's centered but it shows a slight bowing out on the sides.

http://tinyurl.com/2xvpnj

Here's the pic. (thumbnail/click).

[jagabo]

The image I linked to was 720x480. If you burn that to a 4:3 NTSC DVD without resizing it comes out perfect. If you use software that assumes square pixels on input images you'll get an incorrect AR on DVD.

[MysticE]

The image I linked to was 720x480. If you burn that to a 4:3 NTSC DVD without resizing it comes out perfect. If you use software that assumes square pixels on input images you'll get an incorrect AR on DVD.

I must be doing something wrong then. I just did a "save image as" and this is what I got. Here's the image. Note the black on the sides and how the top scale is cut off. And should not the circle be round?



The pic I made looks round on the PC and round (a wee bit off) on my TV. And is pretty well centered. Oh well.

[jagabo]

The circle should not be round when viewing the image on a PC monitor. It already has the correct pixel aspect ratio for DVD.

If the circle in your 800x600 image appears round on your TV it's because the software you used corrected the aspect ratio for DVD. The software did this to your image:



It should have resized the image to 704x480 then added 8 pixels of black (I used gray so the added borders would be obvious) at the left and right edges. Some software will take a shortcut and just resize to 720x480.

The image I linked to was probably an actual video capture. It is sligtly off center -- as is typical with video capture. But the point was to simply get rough idea of how much his TV is overscanning. If he made a DVD correctly (for that image) the results would have been close enough.

[MOVIEGEEK]

Here's a couple more(NTSC):

[MysticE]

All right I'm starting to understand now. I made another pic this time at 720X480 and put another perfect circle in it. When I burned it looked perfectly round on the TV. But when I took a screenshot off the DVD I got this.

If the circle in your image appears round on your TV it's because the software you used corrected the aspect ratio for DVD.

There in lays the answer. I used a DVD picture slideshow app to create the DVD which properly displayed my pic but corrected the AR for DVD.

To use MOVIEGEEK's pics the same way in the same app I have to resize the image to 720X540.

I appreciate your insight.


@MOVIEGEEK
Thanks for the pics.

[jagabo]

If the circle in your image appears round on your TV it's because the software you used corrected the aspect ratio for DVD.

There in lays the answer. I used a DVD picture slideshow app to create the DVD which properly displayed my pic but corrected the AR for DVD.

It would be useful for you to work out a method that preserves the orignal frame. Resolution test patterns like the one posted by MOVIEGEEK will be messed up by resizing. I frameserve from AVISynth or VirtualDub in cases like this.