I've been experimenting with SimpleDivx to backup DVDs to my PC, which is connected to my widescreen TV by VGA cable for viewing. I'm confused slightly be aspect ratio, sizing and cropping. I've tried two DVDs: one states it's 16:9 and the other 2.35:1, both are PAL. I want to get these into an Xvid or Divx format that will view the best on my 16:9 LCD TV via VGA when played on VLC or similar. When I use the default settings of SimpleDivx (auto resize and autocrop) the quality is good but the videos look wide and thin (not stretched at all) on the TV, with a lot of letterboxing. This is quite different to how the appear on the TV when using the DVD player. This does not appea r to be entirely down to cropping since when I compare the same frame from each source the DVD player is showing just as much width but is somehow taller at the same time. How do I go about encoding these DVDs so they don't have so much letterboxing? Obviously I could just use VLCs A/R or cropping/zoom functions to add height but then the width is being cropping. I'm guessing this is something to do with anamorphic widescreen but my brain is not up to working out how to sort through this. Thanks N
Try Avidemux, it has resizing/cropping filters http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=126164 http://mulder.dummwiedeutsch.de/etc/adm_wink/avi2dvd.htm
My advice use fairuse 2.6 lite(free). From my expirence unless your program has the ability to show the preview screen and let you crop it there, your always going to get the letterbox effect. With fairuse you get a preview screen that shows how the video will look all you have to do is move the dotted line crop out the letterbox and only encode the movie. Then fairuse has a feature call optomize for tv viewing (this will only allow you to use the settings that will work perfectly when viewing on a TV. All my xvids encoded with fairuse view perfectly on my 19 inch crt TV and also on my 27 lcd bigscreen with no letterbox. Thats the easy way to do it. http://www.fairusewizard.com/lang_en/fairuse_wizard_dvd_divx_xvid_backup_tool_light_edition.html
