Need to find utils that can add Pan and scan vectors in mpeg video streams

[schizo]

So far I've found two utilities that can do this; restream and mpegrepair. Did a test with restream but it did not seem to have worked, and since the documentation for restream is quite sparse (just a readme file...) I thought I'd look around for an alternative. MpegRepair is quite expensive and very slow about adding the PnS so I'd just as soon give it a miss if I can.

So, are there any other utilities out there that can insert the necessary information into an mpeg stream to enable true pan and scan playback?

The background here is of course that I have a player which won't play back SVCD mpegs fullscreen, so I need to make it stretch the picture by setting a pan and scan window of the same size as the mpeg. I can and have successfully used avisynth to stretch the film and reencoded it in CCE but this is a very lengthy process and is bound to produce a loss in image quality, so I thought I'd shoot two birds with one stone and find a fast and lossless workaround, and for this the best candidate seems to be to fiddle around with PnS.

[ChrissyBoy]

schizo: I'm working on an addition to my application to do this. To that end i have produced a sample for people to test. If the feedback is consistent I'll add it to my application

See: http://www.svcd2dvdmpg.com & the Samples section

from that page....




This sample has had sequence display extension headers added to the mpeg stream. This is interpreted as Pan & Scan information by Pioneer DVD players and so gives perfect playback. For this to work you must set your player to 4:3 Pan & Scan before you play the DVD. Consult your manual if you are unsure how to do this.



Thanks in advance

[schizo]

Ok, thanks for the tip - will test your sample immediately and let you know how it worked out (thank heaven for rewritable media.. ;))

Kudos on the effort so far, much appreciated.

[schizo]

Okay, tested the sample on my Pioneer 626D with 4:3 Pan & Scan set on the player, but no joy. I am starting to doubt I'll ever get this working on this player, may have to buy a new one that supports SVCDs.

Thanks anyway :)

[ChrissyBoy]

Pity:

I got a few that it does work with:

DV-525
DV-333

and now one that doesn't work:

626D

Thanks for the test. (what was the issue 2/3 horizontal screen?)

[schizo]

np

And yes, the problem is a picture filling 2/3 of the screen.

Just did a test with a normal DVD and verified that the player does indeed support both pan and scan and letterboxing on normal DVDs, but evidently it does not understand mpeg2s with nonstandard resolutions - on one occation I even tested a VCD1 compliant CD-R with svcd film and got the exact same result.

Oh well, a shame but there you go.