Still menu screens too big for TV

[twistee]

Hi,

I have been creating my own still menus (in photoshop and saving them as jpg, then converting to mpg with TMPGenc) and it seems no matter what resolution i set them at they are cropped when i watch them on my standalone player. Its as if the picture is too big for the screen...but when i watch them on my computer they are fine. I have encoded them at 352x288 and 704x576. I am also encoding them as a VCD.

[zambelli]

What are you using to burn the SVCDs?

[twistee]

I am making vcds...i know this is the svcd place...but no one was answering my in the vcd place, and i dont think there would be much of a difference if i used mpg2. I used VCDeasy and TSCV, I also noticed that things were cropped when I used Nero as well.

[Kedirekin]

It's just TV overscan. If you want to make sure your menus look okay on TV, you need to give them a border.

For SVCD, I'm pretty sure a 32 pixel border all the way around is safe, though you might get away with as little as 20. I'd expect that on VCD, you'd only need about half that (because it's roughly half the resolution).

You'll have to experiment a little if you want to find the maximum viewable size, and be aware that overscan varies from TV ot TV (and even on the same TV from day to day).

PS. You'll see the same 'cropping' via overscan on the movie portion of the VCD.

[twistee]

Is there an easy way to add borders? Or is it pretty much getting the jpg and increasing the size of it by a certain amount of pixels? Is there any way of adding a border to the 'movie' portion of my vcd?

[Kedirekin]

I just went back an looked at your post in the VCD forum. I think you might be confused.

There is nothing wrong. This 'cropping' that you see on a TV is completely normal, and has been for as long as there have been TVs. Try comparing playback of a DVD on a TV versus a PC and you'll see the same 'cropping'.

Don't try to solve the problem because you can't. TV overscan is just something you have to live with and compensate for.

[Kedirekin]

If you mean adding a border to an image that is already 352x240 (or whatever) then no, I don't know an easy way. You really need to be designing the menu to fit in the center 344x224 area of the 352x240 area from the beginning. I suppose there might be image editing software that'll do a high quality resize of a jpg image, but I don't have any recommendations.

I don't know your encoding method, but there is undoubtedly a way to resize the image to 344x224 and add an 8 pixel border all the way around. This would be pretty unusual though - even the major studios just resize to full size and just let overscan happen. There's rarely anthing happening on the edges of the screen that needs to be seen.

[twistee]

I just used Adobe Photoshop 6 to do the jpg (increased it by 18% in size and worked fine). I guess i will live with overscan on my movie bits, oh well. It was the menu i was more worried about, and that fixed it. Thanks.