Changing aspects from 4:3 to 16:9, any distortion of picture

[krazyscotsman]

I have a dvd in 4:3 format. I just bought a wide screen tv and I'm wondering can I convert the 4:3 movie to 16:9 using dvdmaestro without causing the picture to be distorted in anyway? Or would it be best just to leave it as a 4:3? Thanks.
Scotsman

[VidGuy]

DVDMaestro just "flags" the video as 4:3 or 16:9. 4:3 or 16:9 is the aspect ratio and once a video is encoded at a given ratio it's stuck.

However, if you have a letterbox movie, you can normally use a Zoom button on your TV to remove most or all of the letterboxing.

You could also reencode the whole video bystretching it's height by 33% and then cropping back to 720 x 480 to create a new DVD that was 16:9. I've done that with a few videos and it works OK.

If you just use DVDmaestro to change the flags - the picture will be distorted on display unless you mess around with DVD and TV settings - you could possible come up with a combo that doesn't distort.