Converting Wide screen to Full screen?

[Datahead]

Hello all:
By the way this is a great forum.
Anyway I have a large collection of DVDs that I'm converting to avi for my media center PC. The question I have is Full screen avi seem to look better on playback, I.E. no black bars etc. Is there a way to convert wide screen DVDs to full screen during conversion. It's not that I don't like 16:9, just don't like the black bars.

Thanks
Datahead

[Baldrick]

Use a software player for your media center pc that can zoom instead.

[ranchhand]

If I understand your question correctly, I think that what you mean is that you want to convert a 16:9 aspect ratio to a 4:3 aspect ratio so that it will play full-screen on a normal 4:3 television. Without reencoding I don't think it can be done, and if you did I suspect that you would lose a certain amount of the original frame.

What Baldrick suggested is what we do at work with a client that has this problem with his company presentation video that was created in 4:3, and now they want to rent one of our large plasmas to present it on in 16:9; it's not the best solution, but it is the only one available right now (as opposed to totally re-creating the video in 16:9).

[Datahead]

Thanks Rick, and believe me I understand the zoom for sure.. But there is the wife factor. I'm using the MCE 2004 Machine as my main system in the living room as it seems the most stable, and that version of MCE does not have the zoom feature. Hence the reason for converting to 4:3.

I have MCE Vista, 2005, and 2004. Also I am sharing these files across my home network and most of the displays throughout the house are 4:3. Just thought there might be a fix other than zooming. As I have just started ripping my dvds reencodeing isn't a issue. and it is just the dvds that are widescreen format.

Any Ideas?

[redwudz]

What the TV people do is called 'Pan and Scan'. If you just remove both sides of a wide screen video, you will lose that part and it may be a necessary part of the video to fill in the story. So they move a 4:3 (1:33:1) 'Window' back and forth to keep the action centered on a regular TV screen. A lot of us believe that ruins the movie, besides being a lot of work. But to each his own. Without the panning part you may have scenes where someone seems to be talking to a wall or similar. A good explanation of the process: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_and_scan

If you are converting your DVDs to Xvid or similar, you should be able to do the cropping at the same time as the encoding. A good compromise with most simple encoders is to trim back about one quarter on each side, and at least reduce the black bars in size. If you convert a regular wide screen 2:35:1 to a 1:33:1 you will lose about half the viewable image.

[Datahead]

Thanks guys:
Sounds like I'm going to have to lose the wife...LOL (Just kidding)

Think the solution is to upgrade the main system to MCE 2005.
Thanks for the help.

[redwudz]

Sounds like I'm going to have to lose the wife...LOL (Just kidding)

Or buy her a nice new widescreen TV for Christmas.

[Noahtuck]

Sounds like I'm going to have to lose the wife...LOL (Just kidding)

Or buy her a nice new widescreen TV for Christmas.

On top of that, you could show here some samples like these....

http://www.widescreen.org/examples.shtml

http://www.widescreen.org/examples/lord_rings_fellowship/index.shtml

To show her how much of the picture that will be lost & missing, deforming a perfectly good widescreen movie 8)

[theewizard]

your converting DVD to avi

your already encoding, the only thing you have to decide is wheter to letterbox ( top and bottom black bars like the TV station does ) or to crop on the sides so the center section of the video fills the whole screen,

it is quite simply a sizing issue, you have to encode/convert to avi anyway to store it, so just just choose which method to size it

it will be done as part of the conversion/encoding