How to convert 4:3 480i to 16:9 with side pillar boxes in Avisynth?

[VideoFanatic]

When I keep my video as 4:3 480i, whenever a MultiAVCHD authored Bluray title loads on my TV, it plays in 16:9 stretched by default and you have to use the aspect ratio button on your remote control to switch back to 4:3. There's no way to fix that in the program. The only way I can make the video practically play in 4:3 by default is to encode the video in 16:9 and add side pillarboxes.

I imagine that selecting 16:9 in my video encoder will just stretch my 4:3 video to fill the screen, so I assume I need to do the aspect ratio conversion in Avisynth. So how can I convert my 4:3 480i video to 480i 16:9 with side pillarboxes in Avisynth?

[Brad]

From what I recall you only want to do SD upscaled to 720p, yeah?

In that case yes; Blu-ray only supports 16:9 square pixel for the HD resolutions. If you encode to 720x480i Blu-ray you can keep it 4:3 with no bars hardcoded (set the correct aspect ratio in x264's options).

For 4:3 (progressive) to 720p:
LanczosResize(960,720).AddBorders(160,0,160,0)

Replace with whatever your preferred method to upscale is.

[VideoFanatic]

Sorry if I didn't make it clear but I want to keep the video as 480i. What do I do?

[Brad]

Encode your video as 720x480 with --sar 40:33.

http://www.x264bluray.com/home/480i-ntsc

After you've made your folder with MultiAVCHD, play it on your PC first to see whether the AR is maintained.

[2Bdecided]

If you really can't make your player+TV auto switch the aspect ratio even with correctly encoded material, and you want to stay in SD, it's pretty simple to pillarbox the video...

spline36resize(540,480)
addborders(90,0,90,0)

That's it. You'll lose some quality due to effectively reducing the horizontal resolution (may be visible or not, depending on source), and of course you'll have to re-encode - which is a pain for such a trivial thing, and reduces quality.

Cheers,
David.

[VideoFanatic]

Encode your video as 720x480 with --sar 40:33.

http://www.x264bluray.com/home/480i-ntsc

After you've made your folder with MultiAVCHD, play it on your PC first to see whether the AR is maintained.

No it doesn't work, it just stretches the video to fill the whole 16:9 frame. It looks like what the guy said above is true - the only way to do it is to convert to 540 x 480 and add side borders so I don't think I'll bother as I don't want to lose quality.