Converting Letterbox 4:3 to Anamorphic 16:9

[flaycrow]

I have a couple of older DVDs that were published in a 4:3 "letterbox" format. I say letterbox in quotes because they basically just added a black bar at the top and bottom of the screen. One of these DVDs is a flip disc (one part of the movie is on one side of the disc, and you have to flip the disc over to finish the movie).

I've found tools that will let me combine the two sides of the disc (e.g. DVDRemake Pro), but Ithat only solves one small part of the problem. I'm perfectly willing to use multiple tools to accomplish the overall goal, but I'd like to limit the number of times that I'd transcode the video for obvious reasons. I'm not entirely new to encoding/transcoding, but I am certainly no expert. Can anyone point me in the right direction to accomplish this?

Thanks in advance!

[manono]

The free version of DVD-Rebuilder has a setting to convert widescreen 4:3 DVDs to 16:9. It crops, resizes, and then reencodes for 16:9.

[flaycrow]

That sounds very promising. What tool shouldI use to join the two sides of the disc before using DVD Rebuilder?

[manono]

I thought you said you were going to join them using using DVD-Remake Pro. That's perhaps the easiest way. Unless you don't mind losing the menus, in which case you can reauthor them to a single DVD using DVD Shrink before then sending the output to DVD-Rebuilder.

[flaycrow]

My apologies -- I found a solution, but forgot to post on this forum (very rude of me, I know). I used DVD Shrink to rip the DVD to the hard drive without re-encoding (just removed the encryption). I then used TMPGEnc Authoring Works to join side A and B of the flip-disc into a new file. After doing this, I used your suggestion of using DVD Rebuilder to remove the black bars at the top and bottom and re-encode.

Everything worked perfectly! The only qualms I have with the result is that, when the DVD was originally authored, thin black bars were added to the sides as well. As a result, there now appears to be a black border all the way around the video. Not a fault of the tools used here, but I hate that the studio released this type of garbage. I don't know enough to "crop" the video, so I'll proably have to live with it.

Thanks much for your help, manono!