I've seen a lot of posts on this topic in the past on this forum, but none of them conclusively answers the question: how to get a 16:9 move to play as widescreen on TV via SVCD? I am using TMPGEnc and get a 16:9 MPEG-2. It plays in widescreen mode on several PC media players. I am new to this, so I waisted a lot of disks trying to figure out how to do this conversion thing right and sometimes I got the move to actually play in widescreen on the DVD player. This goes to show me that IT IS NOT the stand-alone DVD player's doing. Finally, after I thought I got it all down, I go to encode and burn two more copies (I thought they were FINAL) of this SVCD only to get a stretched 4:3 output. I use the 480x480, "Keep aspece ratio" settings and 16:9 on all screens. Does anyone have an answer??????
I found the answer yesterday. Seems to me like a lot of people were confused about this issue, so here it is. There are two screens in TMPGEnc where you need to specify the aspect ratio: "VIDEO" and "ADVANCED." Being new to the whole converting business and an inpatient user at that, I used to set both of them to 16:9 ratio for wide screen movie. That would be OK if you actually have a wide screen TV. The first SETTINGS screen -- "VIDEO" -- provides the opportunity to specify the output format for your (S)VCD streem. If you set it to 16:9, it will assume you have a wide screen TV and get rid of the black bars necessary for preserving wide screen format on a conventional 4:3 TV set. So there you have it! For those who had issues with TMPGEnc stretching your widescreen movies to full screen on a 4:3 format TV, make sure you have your output stream formatted for the TV set that you'll be using to play the video. Best luck to all, Haris
