anamorphic VCDs

[kakomu]

I was playing around with TMPEnc, and I found that having your widescreen movie centered and full screen (no black bars) and setting the aspect ratio to 16:9 will produce a movie that when played full screen on a computer will actually be anamorphic. Is this a standard feature for VCD and DVD players...Do only some VCD and DVD players support it? or is this just a computer only feature? Lastly...is NTSCfile a spec for all DVD players?

[adam]

I'm pretty sure 16:9 is not officially supported in either the VCD or SVCD standards, I could be wrong about SVCD though.

In any case, this does not seem to be something widely supported in DVD players, not for SVCDs and VCDs anyway. I've tested amorphic SVCDs on every player I can find at my local Best Buy and Circuit Shitty, and only a few of them worked.

I assume you meant ntscfilm. Most commercial NTSC dvds store the film as ntscfilm and use pulldown flags to playback the movie at the NTSC required framerate of 29.97fps. I think any dvd player should support ntscfilm encoded DVDs IF you include the pulldown flags. The same seems to hold true for SVCDs, at least I have never heard of a player which couldn't properly playback an ntscfilm SVCD w/ flags.

As for VCD, ntscfilm (23.976fps)is supported in the standard, whereas DVD and SVCD only support 29.97fps. This means that the dvd player is supposed to autotelecine the VCD and this is why no pulldown flags are needed. Unfortunately it seems not all players do this or do it well, so sometimes you get jerky playback but most dvd players will properly playback ntscfilm VCDs.

[Buttfreak]

Just wanted to add my two cents on the anamorphic issue. I much prefer encoding my VCDs and SVCDs in amorphic widescreen as, in my opinion, this results in a much higher quality picture on my widescreen television.

If you are sourcing from DVD then you are correct, setting the arrange method to Full Screen will result in a correct anamorphic MPEG (if you are sourcing from an AVI it's a different story, check my post here (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=47360) if you're interested). While Adam is correct, most players don't read 16:9 flags in SVCDs (VCDs don't have them) although mine does, this does not matter!.

As long as you have a TV that is either (a) widescreen (congratulation, and welcome to the club) or (b) has a 16:9 or widescreen button (all SONYs and most new TVs have this) you can still enjoy the benefits of a higher resolution transfer. Just pop the disc in and press that button, the movie will display in its correct aspect ratio on your TV. If you only have a regular 4:3 TV there isn't much point, but if you have a 16:9 TV you have everything to gain. Instead of "zooming" in on the middle part of the screen, you are "stretching" the picture horizontally and the result is much more pleasing.

As you can tell, this is an issue close to my heart. I have struggled to find other people on this forum who are as keen to encode anamorphic VCDs and SVCDs as I am (save hakka504).

Take care and happy encoding!

/Buttfreak

[FlimsyFeet]

I have made a few, my DVD player seems OK with them, and yes, the quality is better. Especially for NTSC material, because of the smaller vertical resolution and the fact the screen has to be zoomed for non-anamorphic picture, you can see the gaps between the scanlines on my PAL TV! Anamorphic discs that don't need to be zoomed look better.

I thought the same as Buttfreak, but I read somewhere on usenet that the reason people don't make 16:9 SVCDs is not that DVD players ignore the aspect ratio flags, it's because some of them refuse to play them at all! (or play with stuttering problems, etc.)

So what I was thinking, for these players, you could make an SVCD with an anamorphic video, but give it a 4:3 flag. Then manually set the TV to 16:9 mode.

This can be done with VCD, MPEG-1 does not support aspect ratio flags, but you can still put an anamorphic picture onto a VCD. i found a guide here that tells you how:
http://www.movieking.co.uk/visitors/vcd-television.html