DVD resolution question

[Saiya-Jin]

I'm not sure where to post this, so I apologize if this is the wrong forum.

I was wondering something. An NTSC DVD's resolution is 720x480 right? Now, let's say you have a 16:9 or 1.85/2.35 aspect ratio movie. In these cases, are the black bars part of the 480 lines or are they all part of the movie and the DVD player/TV takes care of the bars? So for example if I encode the movie to DivX or whatever, and I want to preserve all the lines. Should I encode with the same resolution (no resizing) but cropping the black bars that appear?

I hope I'm making sense here, hehe, if not I'll try to rephrase the question.

[Mug Funky]

DVD supports 720x576, 720x480, 352x576, 352x480, 352x288, 352x240 resolutions (the latter 2 must be mpeg-1)

the black bars are either added at playback or hard-coded.

check the back of a DVD for the word "anamorphic" - this means a 16:9 frame is squished to fit in a 4:3 frame, so all characters look rather tall and thin. when the DVD player gets a 16:9 flagged video like this, it will usually resize the image and put black bars on it.

i say "usually", because most players can be told what kind of TV you have - it's better to view 576 lines on a wide screen then to see 432 lines on a 4:3 screen with a load of black. my TV is 4:3, but has a "squish" mode where it scans a smaller vertical area (effectively making it widescreen). this is better than letting the DVD player do it because i get finer detail this way.

[Soulhunter]

Read through this (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=75354&perpage=20&pagenumber=1) thread, or browse the links below... ;)

- Link 1 (http://www.uwasa.fi/~f76998/video/conversion/)

- Link 2 (http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/aspectratios.htm)

- Link 3 (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=42708)


Bye

[Saiya-Jin]

Oh man, I can't believe I missed those threads. Sorry about that and thanks for your replies ;)