Losing parts of image during playback

[Karovaldas]

I am a complete newcomer to this area.

I have a standard VCD file in 352 x 240 format; however, when I play it back on the Sony 655 DVD player and Sharp TV, I lose parts of the picture on all of the sides. It does not do that when I play SVCDs encoded in 480 x 480 as well as 720 x 480 formats; however, it seems that those get borders added on all four sides. What I mean is, when I play them back on the PC the picture does not reach the edges of the monitor completely.

Should I be manually adding borders to my VCD projects or is something wrong with my DVD player or TV.

Help is appreciated greatly. Thanks!

[mordant]

This is because of overscanning. On a standard TV some of the image is always outside the TV borders. This is good when watching VHS tapes because they often have noise along the bottem edge. When watching DVD's, VCD's and SVCD's its not something you want...especially when encoding SVCD/VCD for your own use because you are wasting bitrate on a part of the picture that won't be seen. You can make borders around your encodes using FitCD or MovieStacker to do the resizing, they have an overscan setting that you can modify from 0-3 (might even go higher). You can try it with different settings and see which work best with your TV.

There is nothing wrong with your TV or player.