how to determine aspect ratio of clip for DVD output?

[perfection]

I have several videos lying with me on the PC and i wish to create dvds out of them. How do i decide whether they are more suitable for 4:3 or for 16:9 ?

Do i take the clip dimensions and divide the same and find out whether the result is closer to 1.33 ot 1.77? Soem authoring programs i have experimentewd with do thisd automatically ut not the one i use currently

What is the right way to go about this?

Thanks

[davexnet]

A program like AVStoDVD does quite a good job of this. If the A/R is close to 16:9,
I think it offers to crop a small amount from the top and bottom to bring it up to 1.77.
Then it makes a 16:9 anamorphic DVD.

Much less than that, go with 4:3

[perfection]

Thanks for the reply but my cl;arification is yet unanswered as to whether what i am doing to dtermine the final dvd aspect ratio is right or wrong in approach

[davexnet]

AS you said in your first post, assuming the videos have square pixels (almost all AVI files do)
calculate width/height and use the ratio to determine your DVD .

[manono]

Ordinarily, any video with a ratio greater than 1.55:1 (width divided by height) can benefit from 16:9 encoding. The lowest film aspect ratio where that applies is 1.66:1 which used to be fairly common. Otherwise, anything less than 1.55:1 should be encoded as 4:3. So, the common ARs of 1.33:1 and 1.37:1 should be encoded as 4:3. This doesn't much apply to downloaded and already highly compressed videos which are usually garbage to begin with, but since you asked...

Soem authoring programs i have experimentewd with do thisd automatically ut not the one i use currently

Authoring programs do just that - author. Encoding is something completely different. And unless you're dyslexic or have some other excuse, I'd take more care with my writing if I were you, if I wanted to be taken seriously around here.

[davexnet]

Yes, I have some commercial anamorphic DVD's where the source was 1.66. AS long as the top poster knows that it entails
some cropping to get it to fit, he should be in business.