Big Bars?

[PJB]

Ok....I have a DIVX AVI (640 x 272). I know that this is an animorphic ratio (ie: 2.35).

I am converting this to an SVCD where I calculate the vertical resolution to be 272 as it is NTSC. ie: 480 x 278.

When I display this on a 4:3 TV I get the picture in the correct aspect ratio, but it is a not very high and has BIG black bars on it. It is really hard to watch like that.

The same movie from a real DVD has much thinner black bars and the picture displayed in letterbox format is much higher. Is there anything I can do when encoding the movie to get a better result, ie: something that looks much more like the letterbox I get from playing a real DVD.

Thanks

[scottrempel]

I'm not sure if it will apply to your case, but when I create a VCD from a widescreen DVD in TMPEG I use the following settings:

Set your source as 16:9 NTSC and Full screen (keep aspect ratio 2)
Set the stream as 4:3 NTSC

Hope this helps you!

[DJRumpy]

Make sure that your resize operation isn't trying to retain the width or height of the picture. This will give you a letterbox about 1/2 the height. To verify, open the SVCD with Media Player. MPlayer doesn't know what svcd is, so it just displays it as 480x480. If the aspect ratio looks right, i.e. their not stretched out in any way, then your resizing incorrectly.

The smartresize filter for VDub is bad about this for SVCD. The built in filter for virtual dub is actaully easier to use for this setup.

Try resizing yor video to 480x356, and filling the remainder with letterbox.