Is it possible to re-edit a non-anamorphic dvd to anamorphic?

[guns1inger]

look it up in the glossary

[jagabo]

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

[jman98]

It's fully intentional.

W.T.F?

You may not like it, but jagabo is right. TV manufacturers do this DELIBERATELY. If they didn't, idiot customers would flip out when they saw the garbage that can appear at the outer edges of TV broadcasts and even some DVDs and complain that their TV was "broken" when in fact it was correctly displaying the video signal it got.

Note that some very good HDTVs do not have any kind of fix for overscan at all. I have a Samsung and it cannot be turned off. I did some research and found out that there is a firmware update for my TV that removes overscan ONLY on HDMI connections. If you apply this update, it actually increases the amount of overscan on all other connections. That's a losing proposition for me. I also found out that some people bricked their TVs when they tried to update the firmware, so I'll just live with overscan, thank you.

Some years ago, a few DVD players allowed you to actually choose underscan for the video output they sent to the TV and on those you would always get a full picture, but I don't know of any currently made DVD player that has such an option. I mentioned that once here and some guy responded that he thought that some player (I don't remember which) still allowed it, but he seemed to not really understand what we were talking about. I stand by my statement that to best of my knowledge no currently manufactured DVD player allows you to underscan the video.

[jagabo]

Some historical context:

Early CRT televisions could not keep the picture the same size, centered, and linear (barrel, pincushion, trapezoidal, and blooming distortions). As the TV heated up, as it aged, even as the picture content changed all these parameters varied. The solution was to mask the edges of the tube with a slightly rounded bezel. The outer 5 percent of so of the screen was covered up. If the picture slid a little to the side, shrank or grew a bit, or was slightly distorted you wouldn't notice because you didn't see all the way to the edge of the picture and there were no straight edges to hilite the non-linearity.

Broadcasters know that you won't see all the way to the edge of the frame so they don't put important information out there. This leads to the definition of the "action safe" and "title safe" areas. The title safe area should be visible on just about every TV, even those that are significantly out of adjustment. An advertizer would be very unhappy if their address or phone number wasn't visible to a large portion of thier viewers. The action safe area defines a larger area where you want to keep the main action. Some TVs may miss part of this but the information isn't critical.

Since broadasters know you won't see the outer few percent (on each side) of the frame they don't worry about noise or other garbage appearing there, or whether the picture data fills the entire frame. Closed caption data is transmitted at the very top of the frame. VHS and other flying head recording technologies have head swithing noise at the bottom of the frame.

Without overscan all these defects are visible. So even though modern technology has the ability to show every pixel of a broadcast, especially digital broadcasts and DVD, TV manufacturers continue to overscan.

[Beautiful Alone]

This overscan thing just doesn't make any sense, video images doesnt have to be overscan inorder to be center and max out the tv, all it needs is the video content that is similar to the tv's aspect ratio and it would have a prefect match without having to see unwanted edges.

[jagabo]

This overscan thing just doesn't make any sense, video images doesnt have to be overscan inorder to be center and max out the tv, all it needs is the video content that is similar to the tv's aspect ratio and it would have a prefect match without having to see unwanted edges.

If only you had been around in the 1940's to explain that to the TV engineers.

[Beautiful Alone]

Well.. the 4:3 content we have been receiving over the air all these years matches our 4:3 tube TV's, what's the point of over scanning it?

[jagabo]

Read what I wrote.

It's a Catch-22 now. TVs overscan because there's crap at the edges of the frame. There's crap at the edges of the frame because TVs overscan.

[firedancer21]

What is the best way to tranfer a Non-Anamorphic PAL DVD (menu not needed, just need the film) into a Anamorphic NTSC DVD?

[guns1inger]

What is the best way to tranfer a Non-Anamorphic PAL DVD (menu not needed, just need the film) into a Anamorphic NTSC DVD?

Use DVD Rebuilder's built in function to convert the 4:3 letterbox to a 16:9 anamorphic DVD (PAL) then get a PAL capable DVD player. Once you have the output, use DGIndex to demux the audio and video to elementary streams. Use DGPulldown to add a custom pulldown from 25fps -> 29.970 fps. Author the new video stream and the old audio stream into a new disc with Muxman or similar.

Done.

[firedancer21]

What is the best way to tranfer a Non-Anamorphic PAL DVD (menu not needed, just need the film) into a Anamorphic NTSC DVD?

Use DVD Rebuilder's built in function to convert the 4:3 letterbox to a 16:9 anamorphic DVD (PAL) then get a PAL capable DVD player. Once you have the output, use DGIndex to demux the audio and video to elementary streams. Use DGPulldown to add a custom pulldown from 25fps -> 29.970 fps. Author the new video stream and the old audio stream into a new disc with Muxman or similar.

Done.

Thank you for your quick and detailed instructions. I was able to get through everything, except for the last step. For some reason Muxman is not seeing the new Video file. Do you know why that would be? Would you suggest a different program for the last stage if i can't get around it?

[manono]

For some reason Muxman is not seeing the new Video file. Do you know why that would be? Would you suggest a different program for the last stage if i can't get around it?

If it's not NTSC DVD compliant nothing will mux it. Are you sure it's 720x480 and 29.97fps after pulldown? If you don't know, open the M2V in GSpot or MediaInfo and find out. guns1inger may have left out that (important) part - that it has to be resized also. Actually, I didn't understand his reply as I don't understand what a PAL capable player has to do with a PAL to NTSC conversion, and there was no mention of the necessary resize.

And if I were you, I'd go back and retract that nasty comment about Muxman in the Muxman comments section. Do you really expect it to mux something non-compliant? I wonder sometimes why so many people slam perfectly good software when it's really user error. Surely you don't want it to reencode your out-of-spec video when you should have done it correctly in the first place, do you? I can't comment on your problem about not receiving the Pro version, as I know nothing about that, but for simple muxing the free version is more than adequate. Maybe register at Doom9 and then PM the creator, mpucoder. Maybe register at the Muxman forums and ask about it. I'm sure that if you paid he'd be more than happy to send it to you. But, as I said, your problem has nothing at all to do with the version you used.

[Pullings]

I came across this thread when trying re-encode my 2006 star wars theatrical dvd's. I was having trouble watching them, I don't mide bars on the sides for 4:3 or top and bottom for widescreen, but don't really like them on all four sides and the zoom function on my tv cuts some picture off the sides (turning overscan off/on doesn't seem to affect the zoom).

Never done anything like this before but thanks to the advice here I am very pleased with the results, I used DVD Rebuilder, HCEnc & Imgburn. I can now watch them widescreen without losing picture on the sides, they don't look too bad, actually pretty good in places, I'm pretty sure they're better than zooming.

I copied the DVD's to the HD as DVD9 and only changed two settings in DVD Rebuilder, to convert 4:3 letterbox to anamorphic widescreen, obviously, and HC Encoder options to Best(Slowest) - I'm guessing this is the best quality.

Anyway I have a question, after re-encoding the files for the films take up much less space than the DVD9 files, SW was about 6 GB TESB & ROTJ were about 6.5 GB, they are all now about 4.3 GB and fit on a Single layer disc. Is this the best quality I can get out of these DVD's? I wouldn't mind burning to a Dual layered disc for any kind of improvement, I'd just like to squeeze as much as possible out of 'em, within the abilities of a layman of course.

[jagabo]

after re-encoding the files for the films take up much less space than the DVD9 files, SW was about 6 GB TESB & ROTJ were about 6.5 GB, they are all now about 4.3 GB and fit on a Single layer disc.

File size = bitrate * running time

Use a higher bitrate.

[manono]

Except that by default DVD-Rebuilder makes them for a single DVD-5. I believe you can also make them to fill a DVD-9 but, in my opinion, it's not really worth it as the movies won't look a whole lot better. There's just not enough resolution in those widescreen 4:3 versions to make them look really good as 16:9 DVDs. It's just too bad that Lucas refused to release decent theatrical versions of the films in the first place.

[Pullings]

I added these lines to the [Options] section of Rebuilder.ini

LAYER_BREAK_REMOVAL=0
TargetSectors=4050000

I got this info from;
http://www.touchupsoft.com/ComputerTricks/dvd-aspect-ratio-43-to-169/

But it is not working though, still says reduction for DVD-5 is 69 odd percent. Result is the same size. I am using the free edtion of DVD Rebuilder. Also the output path in the .ini file has not updated since I have changed it in the GUI? It does output to the new location however.

It may be any improvement would be negligible but I thought maybe have a go anyway.

And yes, I am boycotting the blu-ray release.