640x360 vs 688x384 on SD TV

[craigarta]

OK I have a strange question to ask.

I have a video I encoded at 640x360 with a 16:9 resolution that when played doesn't fill the screen on the left by a 1/2" in the middle and up to 3/4" closer to the top. But when I do a 688x384 at 16:9 it fills the screen like the DVD does and looks fine.

I tried to take a snapshot of the screen but it really didn't work.

Maybe it is just me but even my 640x480 encodes look weird on my 36" tv. Being they have a curve on the left hand side only, but not anything else.

[craigarta]

Never mind I figured it.

[guns1inger]

Care to share in case someone else has the same problem down the track ?

[craigarta]

My TV just hates anything in the 640 region. I go to 656x368 and it fills in nicely. The pics do not show what I was seeing. but I guess with a TV nearing 10 years old should stop complaining.

[jagabo]

Are you playing these files from a Divx/DVD player? That's probably the source of your problem -- the player isn't sizing correctly.

It also sounds like your TV has linearity problems, a barrel distortion. There may be adjustments you can make. Otherwise, time for a new TV.

[craigarta]

Yah its a DVD/Divx player. But when I play DVD's or divx/xvid that are 720 x ??, they fill the width fine. Also the picture looks great anything else
I may have to look into the adjustments on the TV.

My old DVP-642 plays 640 x ?? great but this DVDR-3390 plays them weird. Maybe its the video file themselves or the player is ignoring the tags

[jagabo]

If you're encoding stuff that you plan to watch again in the future - don't worry about the peculiarities of your current player. Also, be sure Xvid is set to square pixel if you are resizing the frame for square pixels. That is, if you resize a 4:3 DVD to 640x480 you are using square pixels.

[craigarta]

If by this screen yes

[jagabo]

Yes, that's the right place. I guess your current player just has some peculiarity in the way it scales the video to fit the screen.

[craigarta]

I never really noticed it till I was encoding some All in The Family and did a quality control check on my work and noticed it.
It used to be connected to a 19" TV the bedroom and everything was fine, but when I swapped players, thats when I noticed it.
Oh well so there slightly larger files, they still look good and play fine, heck a Q3 vs a Q2.5 for encoding can't hurt.