Anamorphic SVCD on good old 4:3 TV?

[Surfinette]

Here is my problem.
I usually backup anamorphic DVD as anamorphic SVCD since I have an wide screen TV.
However the DVD player doesn't seem to recognized my SVCD as anamorphic (while it does with the original DVD). Hence, I have to manually set my TV screen to anamorphic.
Does this mean an anamorphic SVCD can't be viewed properly on an old 4:3 TV?
Or is there a specific setting when muxing or authoring the SVCD that I could use so the player (or TV) recognise automatically the anamorphic format of the SVCD ? (I am using DVD2SVCD to process my SVCD).

'Hope I made myself clear.

Surfinette

[Jeffster]

I think it's totally dependant on whether your DVD player supports anamorphic SVCD's or not.

I've tested anamorphic SVCD encode's before, out of curiosity (I have a conventional 4:3 TV) and found on my old Philips standalone the aspect ratio was incorrect on my TV. More recently I've tried the same thing with a newer Philips and my Panasonic standalone and they both played anamorphic SVCD's correctly.

Since I used bbmpeg for muxing I guess either the standalone is able to read the 16:9 flag in the mpeg file or it isn't.

[Nick]

Yeah, that's about how I see it.

SVCD is a 4:3 format. An anamorphic SVCD is therefore outside of specification. Some players will play it correctly anyway, but in my experience, most don't.

[Kika]

Yes, that's right. My old Afreey is able to play them correctly only after playing a DVD (any DVD works, just a few seconds are necessary, but that's very strange over all).
My Denon 2910 can play such discs without any tricks, but most of the players i know can't handle anamorphic SVCDs/CVDs.

[Surfinette]

Thank you for your answers
Let's assume that one of my SAP can play anamorphic SVCDs correctly, how do I flag 16:9 in the muxing process?
Or is it earlier in TMPGEnc where there are different settings which can be played with (Aspect ratio, Source aspect ratio, Video Arrange Method)?

Surfinette

[Nick]

The AR flag is set during video encoding.
Or there is a free utility called DVDPatcher which will set the anamorphic flag on an MPEG stream retrospectively.