Hi all This topic has probably been explained before so apologies if I'm asking a repeat question - I did search the forums and couldn't find an answer so please direct me if need be! I'm in Australia so my TV is PAL. My DVD player supports both formats. It is also a DivX player. I have AVIs that are NTSC and 16:9. When I play them on my PC they are 16:9. When I convert them using ConvertX the resulting DVDs play on my TV as 16:9. However, when I put the AVIs straight onto a data DVD (using nero) and try to play them using the DivX capacity of my player they come out as 4:3 with black bars top and bottom. The quality is actually better than when I convert them using ConvertX but the aspect ratio changes. I can use the zoom function on my TV to get rid of the black bars and stretch it out to 16:9 but this is not ideal and has a negative effect on the quality of the picture. I've tried toggling the NTSC/PAL button on my DVD player but that only affects the colour/contrast of the picture and not the aspect ratio. Can anyone explain to me why my 16:9 NTSC AVIs are playing as 4:3 on my PAL TV? And is there any way I can fix it? I much prefer to watch my AVIs this way because converting takes forever (5-6 hours for 1 DVD) and I can keep more AVIs on 1 DVD. Any help would be much appreciated.
DVD players handle the aspect ratio of avi files in different ways. Mine will only honor the A/R of the avi file if I select in the DVD player setup TV type-4:3 letterbox. You didn't state whether your screen is W/S or 4:3, neither did you state how the dvd is connected - HDMI, s-video, etc,etc I'm not sure what you mean when you say "try to play them using the DivX capacity of my player they come out as 4:3 with black bars top and bottom" Are you talking about letter box and pillar box at the same time? Perhaps you should take a picture of the scren showing the problem and post it in here.
Hi Thanks for responding. My TV is widescreen but is not digital and has no HDMI or anything. The DVD player is connected via s-video. And yes, the picture has both pillarbox and letterbox at the same time (which I believe is called windowboxing). It looks like this: windowbox You can tell that the source material was meant to be widescreen (it is letter-boxed) but it is presenting in 4:3 (it is pillar-boxed). The setting on my DVD player is for widescreen. I usually have the TV set to widescreen as well but if I do that with these AVIs the picture is stretched (the way a 4:3 movie is if you try to screen it on a widescreen). In such a case the pillar-boxing goes but the letterboxing remains and the picture is distorted. Like I stated in my first post, if I set the TV to 4:3 and then use its zoom function I can get rid of both the pillar and letter-boxing, however picture quality is diminished. The source material is widescreen, but it plays as 4:3. I have no idea why.
Let me see if I get this right. When you play this avi, the proper aspect ratio is preserved, but it's a small pillar-boxed picture. Also, when you play a proper anamorphic (16*9) dvd, you get a proper W/S picture, correct aspect ratio, with perhaps a small amount of letter box? Whta happens when you play a non-anamorphic proper dvd? Does it behave the same as the avi file? It almost sounds as if the DVD player is indicating something in the signal that switches the TV to this other "mode" (proper widescreen) whenever it detects an anamorphic disk. However, I don't know this for sure.
