ESS chip, AR and widescreen TV... again...

[len0x]

So after reading lots of comments about mainly philips players and their inability of playing AR 1:1 encodes on 16:9 TV - last few questions:

1) If source DVD is anamorphic and you keep it at the same AR (even though you can downsize the picture) it will play correctly, right?

2) If source DVD is 4:3 but widescreen with black bars, then height has to be increased by 1.33 or width decreased to make it anamorphic.

3) If source DVD is 4:3 and full screen then how do you make it play properly with black bars left and right? I suppose one can squash picture horizontally, but do you need to explicitly add black borders to make it fit original resolution?

[Zhnujm]

I can only speak for PAL, so maybe its different with NTSC:

1) If you use the original frame size then the picture is ok (NO vertical resizing)
Of course you can crop the black bars.

2) You can make it anamorphic or just switch the TV to zoom mode.
3) You can add black bars to the left+right or switch the TV to 4:3

But i think for point 2) and 3) it is somewhat normal that the tv has to be switched for such sources, at least with original dvds.
I have seen only one type of player that really adds black bars to the picture (with video-dvd) instead of switching the tv to 4:3, and that are the sigma based players.

BTW, you can have a look at the "excellent" resizing of most (all?) ess based players here:
ftp://zhnujm.dyndns.org/aspect/player/Yamada6100-ESS
These are screen captures of different 4:3 resolution wich should all fill the screen.

[len0x]

1) So you can safely crop black bars then? But anyway no resizing is hardly an option. I mean if I would keep AR as 720/576 for PAL sources but resize it down to lower resolutions - will it still be ok ?

Regarding 2 and 3, yes of course you can adjust your TV, but its much nicer to generate something that do not require that. If everything is kept anamorphic and XviD AR flag is used then potentially you have no problem with playback on PC and standalone + widescreen TV. The only problematic combination is standalone + 4:3 TV (but it should fade away with new players and TVs :) )

P.S. Sigma chip is great indeed. Although it has poor codec support, it has excellent hardware design. I just hope 86xx will include all the nice features of 85xx...

[Zhnujm]

1) Yes, cropping is no problem. Makes no difference. The other thing is more complicated... For resolutions above 624xX the AR is correct if you leave the AR of the source DVD. (for example 640x512,704x560) but for lower resolutions it seems more correct to use a pc-like PAR of 1:1. :rolleyes:
Thats why i would never recommend such a player (at least not for PAL)

For 2) and 3) again, i can see following problem:
Some players stretch avis vertically to pseudo anamorphic if you set them to 16:9. So if you now play a real anamorphic avi file it will get double stretched if the player is not able to read ar flags.
Also some add black bars to left+right for 4:3 avis if they are set to 16:9.

So i think you will never know if this or that file will be played correctly with a hardware player unless it supports ar settings.
Hopefully this will at least supported with the new .mp4 container in new players.
But its also possible with avi if you look at some of the mediatek based players.

[jntaylor63]

Lenox,

Would it not be safer to take a wide screen movie and frame it in a 4:3 box? With V-DUB you can crop the video that you want to encode and then add the black bars on the top & bottom and adds very little to the file size.

There are many DVD like this now. When you play them on a standard TV, you get the bars on top/bottom or zoom in on a widescreen. (They may have a widescreen AR flag too.)

Maybe this could an option in AutoGK?

[len0x]

I'm against of encoding of black bars to be honest. But its simpler just to keep original DVD resolution without cropping/resizing (although 4:3 TVs would have problem with anamorphic encodes).

[jntaylor63]

That's cool,

Still think that your program is the best and beats the hell out of Dr. DivX. Will still keep cropping and take my chance with standalones.