Is it possible to make a widescreen 16:9 aspect ration vcd dvd rip? I've tried everthing and always get a stretched picture. Can anybody give me a step to step guide to making widescreen dvd rips.
Only letterboxed is possible which gives you widescreen with black bars in top and bottom of the picture.
That's exactly what I was told somewhere else. And it seems to be the case since I have yet to successfully get my DVD player to perform the letterboxing for me. I have been doing some tests that may not necessarily be applicable to VCD but more to SVCD or XSVCD. I have been playing with the latter since it seems that I can get closer to what I want. I created a MPEG2 file that originates from my DV cam and it is in pseudo-anamorphic format (i.e. vertically stretched). I used TMPGenc to do the encoding. When I play the MPEG2 video using Windows Media Player, the correct aspect ratio is displayed. That is, Windows Media Player is performing the letterboxing. When I use Ulead's DVD MovieFactory or DVD Workshop to author and burn the CD and play the result inmy television, I get the tall and skinny effect. That is, my DVD player does not recognize it as anamorphic and perform the letterboxing. When I use Nero and burn the same file and play it back on my television, this time my DVD player displays the video with the correct aspect ratio but it crops the left and right of the image. That is, it is using the full height to display the video. Becuase of this, I have a suspicion that there's a flag somewhere that is being set to allow the player to determine what to do with the video. Can anyone confirm or deny this? I have not been successful at finding detail information about the structure of the files that are burned on the CD. For instance, does anyone know the contents of the INFO.SVD file?
SVCD has a bit that says 16:9 or 4:3 to DVD player, but unfortunately some (appx. 40%) of the players don't support aspect ratio recognition for SVCDs for some frigging reason. Problem doesn't really exist if you have 16:9 TV, since you can just simply put anamorphic feature to disc using 4:3 bit and use TV's functionality to stretch the 4:3 picture to cover full display area.
dRD, can you tell me where this flag is? I have been looking for it for a while now. I have a feeling that my DVD player does not recognize this flag. However, I would be very interested in knowing if it is being set. I assume it is since my software players seem to recognize it.
It's somehow encoded inside the video and really the best way to check it is to play it using software player.
Interesting. So, it could very well be that the encoding of this flag may not necessarily be correct. In other words, since it seems to work with some players but not all, the method used to encode this flag may be non-standard. I downloaded the MPEG2 specs and I will check it out. I am really curious about this. I want to identify where this flag is supposed to be in the file and physically check for it via a hexdump. Thanks for all your input.
Look at our article pages, there should be a link to pretty damn good SVCD page that details the whole format pretty well and provides URLs as well. I know that SVCD support in some DVD players is somewhat experimental and I don't think that the problem is with encoding, but I think it is with the actual firmware of the DVD players. One very good point is that appx. 80% of DVD players don't support SVCD subtitles even that they should.
