DivX files on my DVD player...

[quitearush]

I have a Philips DVD player that can play DivX files, so I made a disc with some avi files (with the divx compression format), but when I play it on my player, it seems to cut off the bottom and top a little bit. The resolution of the videos are 640 x 480, do I need to resize the files or am I doing something else wrong?

[jagabo]

There is nothing wrong. Televisions are designed to overscan the image. You have never seen the outer ~5 percent of the picture on anything you have ever watched. You've just never noticed before because you didn't have an external reference.

This question usually comes up because someone has some fan sub anime and can't see the subtitles (pros know not to put the sub at the very edge of the frame). If that's the case you will have to reencode the video with a black border around the edges so that the black border is hidden by the overscan, not the picture.

[quitearush]

Thanks for the answer jagabo. Yeah that's exactly the problem, I can only see about half of the subtitles. Do all TVs do this or just old ones?

And what program would you recommend I use to put a black border around it?

[jagabo]

Pretty much all TVs overscan. The amount varies from model to model, and on CRTs it varies as TVs warm up or age. There are a few HDTVs with no-overscan options. Samsung's current LCD HDTVs for instance.

You can use VirtualDub to add borders and reencode. The best results will come from using AviSynth (to resize and add borders) and VirtualDub (to encode) together. Resize the 640x480 frame to about 576x432 then add borders (32 left and right, 24 top and bottom) to bring the size back up to 640x480.

There are many discussions and guides on this subject. Search for overscan and subs.