fitting file size to screen to play on standalone DVD

[Dolly]

Hi,

I cannot reduce the image to fit to screen, w/ either HD TV or 2 DVD players incl. Philips DVP642 - using all the commands I could find on the remote controls.

If I encode .avi files on ffmpegx I have to reduce them from 720 to 700 to fit to screen. That I can live with.
However, if I convert either size file on Toast 8 to DVD, they return to their original size (720) which is too big for my HD TV. I could not find any choice of files size on DVD conversion in Toast.
I even tried passing the converted file through DVD2one2 but nothing was corrected since there was no VOB problem.

Since there are many tech savvy people on the forum I think someone has the answer. It must be simple and I am not looking in the right place

Thanks!

Mac OSX 10.5.3
2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

[Case]

If I encode .avi files on ffmpegx I have to reduce them from 720 to 700 to fit to screen.

The DVD specification allows for a few very specific resolutions, and 700 px wide isn't one of them. Many commercial DVDs have video at the correct 720 px wide, so I don't get what your mean by "it doesn't fit"? Are you talking about the difference between details on the edge on your computer monitor and details on the edge of your tv screen? That may be due to "overscan", which is perfectly normal and a good director takes that into account, by not putting essential details on the edge of the screen. The amount of overscan differs from tv set to tv set; it is not a fixed amount/percentage.

If you have found a good reason to restrict the picture to 700 px wide, then you could encode with a black border around your image, to have a 700 px image in a 720 px frame.

[Dolly]

If I encode .avi files on ffmpegx I have to reduce them from 720 to 700 to fit to screen.

The DVD specification allows for a few very specific resolutions, and 700 px wide isn't one of them. Many commercial DVDs have video at the correct 720 px wide, so I don't get what your mean by "it doesn't fit"? Are you talking about the difference between details on the edge on your computer monitor and details on the edge of your tv screen? That may be due to "overscan", which is perfectly normal and a good director takes that into account, by not putting essential details on the edge of the screen. The amount of overscan differs from tv set to tv set; it is not a fixed amount/percentage.

If you have found a good reason to restrict the picture to 700 px wide, then you could encode with a black border around your image, to have a 700 px image in a 720 px frame.

No, what I mean is that when the .avi is 720 px. it is cropped on the screen (zoomed). Picture size of player and TV are both set at 16/9. For the TV, my picture settings are Wide, Panorama, Zoo or 4/3. I use Wide. Player has less choices, no Automatic. If I want the .avi frame to fit, I have to reduce it to 700 px. If I take this and convert it to DVD, Toast correctly encodes at 720 and the result comes out oversized on the TV screen. Whereas commercial DVDs come out the right size. Perhaps my TV (2005) and player (2004) are outdated? so they cannot make the automatic adjustment?

[thecoalman]

As mentioned DVD has a set resolution, video for DVD can only have these resolutions (note these are NTSC:

720 x 480 pixels MPEG2 (Called Full-D1)
704 x 480 pixels MPEG2
352 x 480 pixels MPEG2 (Called Half-D1, same as the CVD Standard)
352 x 240 pixels MPEG2
352 x 240 pixels MPEG1 (Same as the VCD Standard)

https://www.videohelp.com/dvd

These have nothing to do with the display aspect, 16:9 and 4:3 both use the same resolution of 720X480. This for example is 16:9 without any adjustments for aspect, Note that the people are tall and skinny and miller light circle is oval:




You would author this as 16:9 video, if you have your DVD player set correctly for the TV you are using it will either display full screen on a 16:9 TV or be letterboxed on a 4:3 TV. Say for example you have 4:3 TV and have your DVD player set to letterbox 16:9 video. The DVD player will see the 16:9 flag and add black borders top and bottom:

[Dolly]

Thanks for the helpful information and tutorial on NTSC screen standards.
The US version of most products are either lagging in advancement or missing components that are available elsewhere in the world.

The .avi files I am encoding are not NTSC standard - they are wider eg. 768x432. Even when I run them through Toast 8 DVD conversion, the resulting picture is too big to fit the entire screen. My HD TV is 16:9. If I set DVD player to 4:3 letterbox, I can see the entire picture w/ black bands on top and bottom. I could chose the PAL option for conversion and see what I get.

For .avi files, I reduce them to 702x400. they fit on the screen. Most of these have to be converted once to be played on DIVX so it is not an extra step. I am resigned to this for the time being. Perhaps with the next extra wide screen TV this will auto adjust.

What a pain for a hobby!

[thecoalman]

Thanks for the helpful information and tutorial on NTSC screen standards.
The US version of most products are either lagging in advancement

If the files had been encoded correctly to begin with and or handled correctly now you wouldn't have an issue.

Anything outside the DVD spec is an extra feature on DVD player and the capabilities of these extras on DVD players vary widely, hence the reson you'll have issues like this. Stick with the standards from the start and its no longer an issue.

[Dolly]

Using ffmpegX, 0.9y, I encoded them thus:

Autosize: 16:9 - (should I have used 16:9 keep height? would that have corrected the problem?)
Frame rate NTSC film
kept file to original minutes.
used auto and best to set bitrate.

If it was at original size of 720+ it became too big.
I had to fiddle with optimal size for my players/ TV which came to 700.

Thanks.

[Case]

"Autosize: 16:9" sets the video size height to match the entered video size width and aspect ratio.
"Autosize: 16:9 (keep height)" sets the video size width to match the entered video size height and aspect ratio.
Sort of like a calculator for the video size fields (but it also sets an aspect ratio flag ("this file should be played at 16:9") on the output file, if the format supports that).