Induced Fit

[Newbzilla]

Sorry if this is in the wrong forum, there's a hell of a lot of them so I've just got to choose the one that sounds the most applicable.

Anyway, my question is this; my DVD player manual said that many widescreen DVDs override the DVD player's settings - As I have found. I have a 4:3 TV, I set the player to PAN&Scan mode, put a widescreen DVD into the player and the disc seems to override my player's settings as it shows the movie in widescreen letterbox mode as opposed to PAN&Scan mode. So is there some program that can easily stop the DVD from overriding the player's settings by editing the files when they're on the hard drive?

Thanks in advance, and yes I have googled this, the irrelevancy is astonishing.

[manono]

Hello and welcome to the forum-
For automatic pan & scan mode, the anamorphic video is unsqueezed to 16:9 and the sides are cropped off so that a portion of the image is shown at full height on a 4:3 screen by following a center of interest offset encoded in the video stream according to the preferences of those who transferred the film to video. The pan & scan "window" is 75% of the full width, which reduces the horizontal pixels from 720 to 540. The pan & scan window can only travel laterally. This does not duplicate a true pan & scan process in which the window can also travel up and down and zoom in and out. Auto pan & scan has three strikes against it: 1) it doesn't provide the same artistic control as studio pan & scan, 2) there is a loss of detail when the picture is scaled up, and 3) equipment for recording picture shift information is not widely available. Therefore, no anamorphic movies have been released with auto pan & scan enabled, although some discs use the pan & scan feature in menus so that the same menu video can be used in both widescreen and 4:3 mode.
http://www.dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#3.5

It can't be done. The Pan-And-Scan setting in your player is useless. Nothing is being overridden. Even if it were implemented, it would be even worse than regular Pan-And-Scan. Watch the movie the way it was meant to be seen. The only way to get around it is to reencode the whole thing, lopping off video from the sides. I'd highly recommend against doing this.

[Newbzilla]

Hmm, I see. I'm not particularly phased by not being able to see movies 'the way they were meant to be seen' (or whatever it is raving widescreen advertisers use to promote what has always been more of an annoyance than a good thing). I've always watched movies in pan&scan mode because that's the way they've been broadcasted on tv for the last umpteen years, so it's not like I'm missing a bit of useless video that's been cropped off, and in my opinion should be cropped off, because 99% of the time what's in view in pan&scan is easily sufficient for a viewing experience.

[manono]

Ignorance is bliss, says this raving widescreen advertiser. And after you get your 16:9 TV set, you'll be one of those whining about the black bars on the sides of all your Pan-And-Scam DVDs, just as you whine about the black bars above and below widescreen DVDs on your 4:3 TV set today. But at least then you'll have a Stretch Mode on your remote so you can stretch them out to fill the screen, making everyone look fat, or a Zoom Mode so you can fill the screen, slicing off even more of the picture. "But I want them to fill the screen. I didn't pay to watch black bars":

http://www.widescreen.org/widescreen.shtml

[r0lZ]

I agree completely with manono. Pan&Scan is the most horrible thing that has ever happened in the video world, with NTSC! Of course, I believe Newbzilla lives in USA. In Europe, the movies are almost never pan&scanned, even when broadcasted on TV.

But you can change the settings of your DVD to watch the movie in pan&scan, if you really want so. It's easy: load the DVD in PgcEdit, and right click on the main movie PGC. Select "Domain Streams Attributes", and check the Automatic Pan&Scan option. Save and burn.
BTW, it's better to leave the letterbox option checked. If both options are checked, you will be able to select the mode you want with the setup of your DVD player. When only one option is checked, that mode is forced.

Be warned: aside from the aestetic problem explained by manono, you must understand that you will force Pan&Scan on a movie which has no pan&scan offsets encoded in the video stream. This means that you will always see ONLY the center of the image, regardless of the center of interest!

Also, if your movie has subpics, you will have to change the subpicture VOB's decoding stream used for Pan&Scan for each PGC of the domain. You can do that in the PGC Editor. (Double click on the PGC to open it.) You will have to copy the stream number used for wide or letterbox mode to pan&scan mode. For example, if you see a subpic using streams "0 2 2 0", you must edit it to have "0 2 2 2". Of course, the subpic you will use has not been designed for Pan&Scan, and therefore will probably be misplaced on screen! Test carefully!

Remember: I don't encourage you to do that! Buy a 16:9 TV instead!

[manono]

Gee, I didn't know that, r0lZ. Maybe it'll help Newbzilla do what he wants.

Interesting what you said about Europeans growing up with movies being shown in OAR (Original Aspect Ratio) on television. I didn't know that either. I blame all those years of Pan-And-Scan versions being shown on TV here in the US for attitudes such as Newbzilla's. As far as I know, there's only one network here, a cable network called Turner Classic Movies, which shows all of their films in OAR (except for pay-extra cable networks like HBO, and even they will often turn a 2.35:1 movie into 1.85:1). Most of their films are older ones in Academy Ratio, but the newer widescreen films are shown in widescreen. Periodically they have a featurette demonstrating why widescreen is better. One of the examples they use is Ben Hur. So here's a film originally 2.76:1, and Pan-And-Scan cuts out over half of the video. So you can imagine what it does to something like the famous chariot race, when all the chariots are spread across the wide screen.

In any event, Widescreen has pretty much won the war here in the US. Except for children's titles, widescreen DVDs sell considerably more copies than the Pan-And-Scan versions of the same movies. I read reports all the time of people going into some place like Wal-Mart looking for a widescreen DVD, and all the copies are sold, or just a few remain, whereas the shelves are still packed with the P&S version of the same movie. Now if only the networks would follow suit so that the public becomes more used to seeing it.

[r0lZ]

I'm glad to hear that things are going the right way in USA.
Here, the DVD market is different. We never see dual aspect ratio DVDs, and there is only one version available, the wide screen one. There are some exceptions, though. Very cheap DVDs are often pan&scanned. Some Disney movies (approx 10%) also. I wonder why they decides that this disney movie must be pan&scanned, but the other ones not!? Often, the same title is available in 16:9 in a collector edition. That's probably the reason: commerce!

[blutach]

Hate full screen. Totally despise P&S - a terrible blot on the history of DVD.

To P&S'ers who feel they're not paying to watch black bars - Turn off the lights and enjoy the movie how it was meant to be seen!!!

(No FS here either, just WS, anamorphic ;))

Regards

[r0lZ]

BTW, I hate also the wording "full screen", very ambiguous, because it's exactly the inverse: you enjoy only a small part of the original movie, as shown on a real full screen!
Pas&Scan should be labeled instead "partial screen", or, better, "butchered movie"!

[Newbzilla]

Lol at you thinking I live in the U.S, you couldn't be further off the mark. I live in New Zealand, and we use the PAL format here.

http://www.phantom.net.nz/images/gp/map.gif

That widescreen advocacy site is such a joke; it selectively chooses the 0.000000000001% of scenes which populate the "why widescreen is useful" list. Movies should have never been shot in widescreen in the first place, my cynical side suspects it was just a ploy to cram more people into a movie theatre. Anyway, you'll find a lot of movies shot nowadays in aspect ratios other than 16:9, the way it was always meant to be!!!!

Anyway, I've decided to encode most of my movies to Xvid, so I can then decide how I want to view them, instead of being oppressed and having the horrible 16:9 aspect ratio forced upon me. Here's a funny one I've heard which supposedly supports widescreen; "The bigger... picture". Actually, it's not a bigger picture, by comparison 4:3 is 16:12, learn fractions retard.


By the way, could someone answer why some widescreen movies have black bars that take up about 1/8th of the screen, and why some take up 1/2 the screen?

[r0lZ]

You should go to the movie (I mean in a movie theater) at least once in your life!
You will see that a wide screen is really bigger! The aspect ratio has nothing to do with fractions. It's only a convenient way to repsesent the proportions, not the size of the screen!

Have you heard about Cinemascope? This format has an aspect ratio of about 2:1. This is why you can still have horizontal black bars on a 16:9 TV.

[manono]

Hi-

By the way, could someone answer why some widescreen movies have black bars that take up about 1/8th of the screen, and why some take up 1/2 the screen?

Your TV set is 1.33:1. 1.33 parts wide for every 1 part high.

One common Aspect Ratio for movies is 1.85:1. Similar ARs would be 1.78:1 and 1.66:1. Those will show on your TV set with small bars on the top and bottom. Many comedies are 1.85:1 or thereabouts.

The common and wider screen ratio of 2.35:1 is often reserved for action films and epics. Most these days are somewhere between 2.35:1 and 2.45:1 on the DVD. On your 4:3 TV set they will have a greater amount of black bars, not quite half the screen.

On my 16:9 TV, so-called fullscreen 1.33:1 video (TV shows and movies) will show with black bars on the sides, 1.85:1 movies show with no black bars, and the wider 2.35:1 movies show with fairly small black bars on top and bottom. While some people with widescreen TVs use various methods to get rid of black bars, I don't care about them, as long as the video is presented in OAR. So, when before a movie shows on the TV set, the message comes on saying something to the effect of, "This film has been reformatted to fit your TV screen", all I can think of is that it doesn't fit MY screen, as I prepare either to turn the channel or to watch some butchered movie with a lot of black bars on the sides.

Gotta hand it to you; you don't give an inch, do you?

[blutach]

@newbzilla - whatever you prefer mate. It's just personal opinion and a few us have expressed ours (what this thread is doing in IFO/VPB Editors, only God knows, but that's another matter).

As for your query regarding 1/8 of the screen vs 1/2 of the screen in black - this has to do with the real aspect ratio the film is shot in. Most stuff these days is around 2.35:1 but it goes even higher (I've seen 2.80:1) and of course lower (1.85:1 is also common).

Given normal telly is 1.33:1 (4 wide for 3 high), you can see that to get the full horizontal in on a 1.85:1 (4 wide for 2.16 high) introduces much less letterboxing than at 2.80:1 (4 wide for 1.43 high). So, the higher the aspect ratio that the film is actually shot in means the bigger the black horizontal bars.


Or you can take your pick and run in P&S (and have the screen filled vertically).

1.85:1 = 5.55:3 - you lose 1.55 "lopped of the sides" = 28% of the picture
2.80:1 = 8.40:3 - you lose a massive 4.40 "off the sides" = 52% of the picture!

You've picked your poison - we've picked ours. Fair 'nuff!

Regards

[jsoto]

@newbzilla - whatever you prefer mate. It's just personal opinion ...
Agree.
I usually encode with a 10% P/S in cinemascope (2.35:1) DARs, mainly because of the big black bars in a 4:3 screen. This means a 5% lose in each side, not too much, but in some cases you can notice it (some credits not completely shown, etc)

So, IMHO the best solution is to encode in Original Aspect Ratio and buy a TV with gradual zoom capability. May be your family have other opinions than yours... (that's my case)

jsoto

[Newbzilla]

Widescreen - "It BELONGS in a MUSEUM" - Indiana Jones.

Personally I don't mind a few black bars, we have quite a big tv, 32". It's just when I was watching the Indiana Jones Last Crusade DVD the black bars which took up more space than the actual video had me miffed.