aspect ratio fix

[iamthedeus]

hi,

I recently output a dvd volume onto my hard drive, from a dvd project in dvdit pro. everything works fine, except--dvdit pro only exports 4:3 menus, and so my when my originally 16:9 menu was exported to a .vob file, it's displayed in squished 4:3 mode.

Now there is a workaround, where through an ifo editor, i change the menu aspect value back to 16:9 in the .ifo menu file. BUT the .vob menu file is still unchanged at 4:3, and although the 16:9 in the .ifo overrides the 4:3 in the .vob, causing the video to display properly, any button OVERLAYS in the menu are displayed at the position they would be at if the menu were 4:3 (since this is what the vob file still thinks the aspect ratio is)

in essence, button base images are displayed in the correct positions, but highlighted and activated overlays are dramatically offset in the screen.

So I was wondering how I would go about correcting the .VOB aspect value, or if you have some other workaround that would fix the problem. Otherwise I suppose I'm going to have to change to a dvd author that supports 16:9 menus.

thanks, iamthedeus

[r0lZ]

The problem is probably caused by the missing 16:9 highlights.

In a 4:3 menu, all highlights are stored in a single subpic stream, because the menu is always displayed in real 4:3 mode.

On the other hand, for a 16:9 menu, several subpic streams (aka button groups) are necessary: one for the standard widescreen image (as displayed on a 16:9 TV) and at least one for the pan&scan and/or the letterboxed modes used for the 4:3 TVs. So, if both the letterboxed and the pan&scan flags are enabled in Domain Stream Attributes, you need 3 subpic streams.

I guess your authoring program produces (or keeps?) only one stream, and therefore, you will not be able to fix the problem only by editing the aspect ratio flags in the IFOs and/or in the VOBs.

If you really want to patch the VOBs, just to be sure, use DVD Patcher (http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=DVDPatcher). You can also verify that there are several groups of buttons with PgcEdit.