Noob letterbox conversion questions

[dandirk]

Well I finally have had enough of dealing with letterboxed widescreen movies on my HTPC.

I started to look into converting the 5-10 of my DVDs that are in the crappy letterboxed 4:3 widescreen content to true widescreen anamorphic (or any reasonable solution). Software players zoom is just to troublesome...

DVDrebuilder seems to be a great app that will do this for me easy enough except for one problem...

I DO NOT want to reduce the size or quality unless I have to (I know there will be quality loss with any re-encode).

I have no intention of burning the new files to DVD, as they are a back up and will be on a file server.

After playing around with DVDreBuilder with Star Wars IV (theatrical version) I must confess I have NO clue what I am doing.

I setup DVDrebuilder to convert a DVDshrink rip of the disk to 16:9 in the AVS section then setup QuEnc encoder to highest quality. Looked in the log file and it is showing a compression of 68%... Not good so I aborted...

I tried the video only mode and it seemed to skip the conversion settings... (zoomplayer reported same input resolution)

I am now trying to trick DVDrebuilder into not compressing the video by telling it a DVD-5 is massive in size. I have done this with adding the setting: QuEncTargetSectors=20000000 to the .ini file.

Though I am not sure how this is going to work out. I looked at the log and reduction is 100% which is good but the target file size says it will be around 38GB which is much larger then the original (6.xGB).

Am I going down the right path here? Am I missing something really easy or not doing something correctly here? I tried searching but it seems many people don't use this app for only 4:3 to 16:9 conversions, so I didn't find a guide...

Thanks much

[manono]

Hello and welcome to the forum,

I am now trying to trick DVDrebuilder into not compressing the video by telling it a DVD-5 is massive in size.

It has to be recompressed. You're cropping and resizing the original video. Telling it to make it super large isn't very bright, as you'll then have to do it all over again (or mess it up even more by having DVD Shrink lower the size).

[dandirk]

The reason I have tried that approach is that every other encoding software I used in the past (Divx years ago) would give 100% detail (as much as possible) if either a set bitrate was set really high or target size was set really high. Most encoders would encode at the bitrate of the original but not higher so files sizes would not be larger than the original but rather compareable.

My first test of this is now complete and it looks to have the same quality as the original. Though it is about 1GB less in size. Not sure if this is normal size reduction for removing the letterbox bars on this movie (Star Wars IV).

Again I am looking to ONLY convert these DVDs from 4:3 to 16:9 , I have no use or need to fit them to any particular medium like a DVD-5 disk...

[dandirk]

It has to be recompressed. You're cropping and resizing the original video. Telling it to make it super large isn't very bright, as you'll then have to do it all over again (or mess it up even more by having DVD Shrink lower the size).


I realize that I am cropping and resizing (if the 4:3 conversion also resizes), and that there will be some change in the source.

I just asking if this is the best way to to convert a DVD from 4:3 to 16:9 without loosing as much detail as possible.

Thanks for the reply!

[manono]

Hi-

My first test of this is now complete and it looks to have the same quality as the original. Though it is about 1GB less in size. Not sure if this is normal size reduction for removing the letterbox bars on this movie (Star Wars IV).

A 4:3 to 16:9 conversion involves cropping 60 rows of pixels from both the top and bottom (for NTSC), and then resizing to 720x480. The size of the active video (the part not taken up by black bars) increases by something like 33%. Therefore, to have something akin to the quality of the original, all other factors being the same (including the quantisation matrix used), the bitrate, and thus the video file size, should also increase by a like amount. If you were to open an original vob from one of those Star Wars DVDs in DGIndex and take note of how it appears, and then open one of the converted 16:9 vobs, you'll see what I mean.

[jdobbs]

My suggestion:

Stop second guessing the software and let it do its job.

All you have to do is select it -- and it will convert 4:3 letterboxed to 16:9 anamorphic. It will do it with the highest quality possible that will fit in the output target size. The only thing you will lose is some or all of the black border... but none of the video content.

[nwg]

I have recently done this three or four times in the last week (new projector doesn't have a zoom mode). You just use DVD-RB the same as before but you also tick the 4:3 conversion in the AVS options.

It works great. I use Procoder and mastering quality.