What makes widescreen different from full?

[Deathwish]

The DVD player is set to output pan-and-scan 4:3?

YES! Thanks alot Jagabo. I dont remember ever having to change the setting for commercial widescreen DVDs I played, but sure enough under General -> TV Display, It was set to Normal/PS. I changed it to widescreen & it looks great. Obviously this is my first wide production

Only problem now is that some of the top & bottom of each screen is cut off. Is there a setting I can change in DVD flick (or other software) that would place lack bars on the top & bottom to produce a safety margin? Or would this change the aspect ratio (which is perfect right now)?

[jagabo]

Overscan is a fact of life on TV. If you have important information near the edges of the picture you'll have to resize to a smaller frame and add black borders to pad back to 720x480. Or, when you capture, keep overscan in mind and capture a larger frame to compensate.

To adjust an existing cap you can use FitCD to determine the resize/pad numbers. 2 blocks of overscan compensation is usually sufficient. But TVs differ in the amount of overscan so test on a few TVs and don't waste time looking for the "perfect" values.

Some other possible issues:

In the following post

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic332217.html#1725857

You said you captured a 856x480 but the sample image you posted was 720x480. I recommend you include something with known dimensions in your captures so you can verify that all your AR processing is working perfectly. Include a big perfect circle or square and measure the final output on your TV to verify that the height and width are equal.

The sample images you posted didn't have very clear text. You may not be using the best of resizing filters (or maybe this was just an artifact of the way you capture frames for posting). If the software you're using has options for resizing filters try using a Lanczos (usually the best option) or Bicubic (good for upsizing not as good as Lanczos for downsizing) filter. Avoid Nearest Neighbor (aka Point) resizing.