MP4 to DVD - Changing the aspect ratio/resolution

[Just Some Guy]

Hi there,

I have some video files in 360P MP4 format, for which the aspect ratio is suitable for mobile devices (iPads, smartphones, Kindle etc.) - they play fine on my Samsung Galaxy S3 - however I'd like to be able to burn these to DVD to watch on the TV or larger screens.

Can anyone recommend both the best aspect ratio/resolution that I need to be converting them to, and the best software to use to do this? I have downloaded a couple of packages but they either seem to throw off the audio so it's not sync'd with the video or distort the video so things look stretched.

The packages I've tried so far are "Any Video Converter" and "ConvertX To DVD 5"

Many thanks in advance.

[Hoser Rob]

Try avstodvd. I don't use dvd encoding/authoring programs much anymore but I don't see any sign they've changed and that was definitely was the best one I ever tried. The only real downside to it is that it installs ffdshow, and while it's good as codec packs go, I don't believe in installing 3rd party codec packs in win7.

The one thing I'd recommend with avstodvd is to force 2 pass vbr encoding ... it'll select one pass cbr if the input file has a high enough bit rate but I disagree with that decision. 2 pass vbr is the only way I found to get consistently good quality results. It'll take longer than 1 pass but there's no way around this if you want quality.

It'll handle aspect ratio by itself pretty well. Any decent program will. I never had any problems with avstodvd regarding aspect ratio.

[Just Some Guy]

Thanks Rob, I'll give that a go and let you know how I get on.