I personally feel that some of the Letterbox's that come on movies are too skinny, but I've always been able to adjust for some of that with my home VD player. If I thought the Letterbox was too skinny on once video I would just adjust my settings in the DVD player to 16:9 and it would be more to my liking, though still remain a Letterbox. But lately, even when I change display settings in the player, it has not affected the viewing size at all. Could it be due to the type of authoring software I'm using? I'm currently using ConvertXtoVD but in the past have used a variety of different programs including Ulead and Nero.
Hi - I often do the same thing re: the 16*9 setting if the movie is too skinny. As far as I'm aware, the only reason it wont work is if you encoded the movie as non-anamorphic (4*3 setting). Try playing the dvd in the PC - is it only a 4*3 window?
Yes it plays back in WMP skinny also. Your right too...I was encoding them in 4:3 in ConvertXtoDVD. The default was set at 16:9 but I thought that if I left it at that, that it would end up in full screen. But now that I think about it, when I first got the program, I left things at 16:9 by accident and everything still played back in Letterbox. So I guess once a file is in a Letterbox format, with some authoring software it will still retain that.
Well it depends. If you have a wide screen TV and the movie is *exactly* ratio of 1.77, then if will fill the whole screen. But if the movie is even wider, for example 2.35, then you get letterboxing no matter how it's encoded or what type of TV you use. Only way not to is to mess with the picture. You can distort the aspect ratio, make objects look unnaturally tall and skinny. Secondly, you can crop pixels off of the sides, making the picture less wide, resulting in smaller letterboxing (but missing sides).
Unfortunately we still have the old standard TV and it will probably be awhile before we can go widescreen. While were on the subject of skinny Letterboxing though, I want to ask you, what is the best way that you know how to change the Letterbox so it's not so skinny? I've tried AVIDemux with some not so good results and I've also been told that you can use AutoGK to re-encode then re-size, though I have not tied that program out yet. I'm also hoping to find a program that will help fix video files where there is a little bit of black on each side
Well you want something that can do it on the fly, without having to incur an extra encoding step. Does convertxtodvd have a way to crop the file before it's encoded?
Wow I'm glad that you asked me that! I didn't think that there was a way in ConvertXtoDVD but I looked a little further and found, under "Video and "Aspect Ratio" you can set it to "user-defined" and make some adjustments. However I will probably have to do a few test burns for awhile to get the hang of things.
convertx2dvd has an excellent crop tool. I've had to use it before and it works great. Usually convertx2dvd can take a widescreen and turn it into a fullscreen 95 percent of the time but there are some movies that are in encoded in a nonstandard resolution, these are the ones that will require that you crop it to get a proper 4x3 fullscreen. As far as fixing an AVI that has a nonstandard resolution, avidemux with the crop filter is still the best tool. It's the only software I use.
Thanks for your input. Yes I'm going to continue to mess around with ConvertXtoDVD, especially when I want to expand a skinny Letterbox a little higher or fill out a screen that has video with the black bars on each side. It's going to take some time to get through the learning curve, and a lot of experimenting, but I'm sure I'll eventually get the results I want. It probably would help if I read the help menu too, but I'm terrible at reading instructions! By the way, what is considered a nonstandard resolution?
