black bars at the top and bottom

[joshuaindi169]

hi im fairly new to this but about 6 months ago i used a guide from this site and i copied a dvd to vcd with superb results no black bar at the top or bottom but now i get these bars all the time can anybody please help me.

[freak_in_cage_10k]

Hi m8,

i am not anything great with this either but i think it is one of the following:

Maybe Its the way you viewed it- on a PC the VCD may have black "letterbox" bars but on a widescreen TV it wont.

when doing the first vcd you may have enabled a "zoom" function, which cuts out the side of the movie making it take up the entire screen of the pc monitor. i know this is possible with dvdx. what software are you using???

[banjazzer]

Many widescreen movies will have borders at top and bottom - even when displayed on a widescreen TV. The only way around this is to zoom the picture (if your TV/DVD player has this option), or to use a different Video arrange setting in TMPG. However, all you are doing is cutting off the edges of the movie.

There is another way, and that is to forget aspect ratio altogether, and use the Full screen or Center setting to fill the screen with the movie. Personally, I prefer the black bars. 8)

[joshuaindi169]

thanks for your reply.

the black letterbox bars are on my tv as well as on my pc the visible picture is very "slim". (my tv is widescreen)

im using dvd2avi then tmpge.

any ideas.

[joshuaindi169]

banjazzer thanks for you reply but my vcds are very slim indeed on my widescreen tv

[banjazzer]

I still think this is what you can expect, bearing in mind the small resolution of VCD. When I play VCD on my 32" TV I have large borders on all sides! These I remove by using the zoom function on the TV.

The standard setting when encoding a widescreen DVD is Video arrange method = Full screen (Keep aspect ratio) - if you want to retain the whole picture.

One thing to do, though, is to crop the picture before encoding - either using Gordian Knot or TMPG. Some DVDs have the picture surrounded by generous amounst of black.