4x3 Letterbox to 16x19 is this possible?

[anth6000]

Dear Group: I am currently capturing 480i from my Dish DVR unit into my pc using the s-video at 640x480 AVI Huffyuv. This 480i is downconverted from 1080i/HD; however when it downconverts to 480i it makes the picture Letterbox 4x3. I have been reconverting my AVI’s with AVI 2 XXX (dvd2svcd configured for avi2dvd). The resulting final mpeg2’s are of excellent quality; however there is no way to properly display these 4x3 letter box dvd’s on 16x9 sets, I can adjust using various modes as you folks are already aware; but none quite display properly & zooming would make it look worse. Originally I had set AVI 2 XXX (dvd2svcd configured for avi2dvd) to output 16x9 anamorphic unfortunately it cropped the sides. There is a sticky on the doom forum by Nick regarding changing the frameserver tab, however cce will not load and tells me it cannot do this framesize. I am assuming this change to the framesever can not handle trying to output to 16x9 anamorphic. It seems it would be possible to change a 4x3 Letterbox to 16x9, but so far I have hit a dead end with AVI 2 XXX. I have been doing some reading on the subject and DIKO was suggested, so maybe I will try it. If anyone knows if what I am trying to do with AVI 2 XXX (dvd2svcd configured for avi2dvd) is possible please let me know. If this post need to be moved to a different area of the forum please feel free to do so.

Thank You,
Will

[L'il Jerry]

Use Avisynth to crop off the extraneous black bars then resize to 720x480 (or 720x576 for PAL) then feed that to CCE (I'm assuming you wanted mpeg-2 final result since you mentioned CCE in the post) and check 16:9 in the options.

[markrb]

I don't have time now, but search in both the DVD2SVCD forum and the Avisynth forum for how to crop. Once you got that figured out then just encode in DVD2DVD(SVCD) as anamorphic 16X9 and it should work.

Mark

[anth6000]

Thanks Mark & Jerry: I havent used Avisynth seperately, but I suppose I could figure it out. If I am doing this prior to converting to Mpeg2 then I would not know how much to crop? Jerry you suggest feeding that to cce well I was hoping to configure avi 2 xxx to do what I am trying to do here.

[L'il Jerry]

Originally posted by anth6000
Thanks Mark & Jerry: I havent used Avisynth seperately, but I suppose I could figure it out. If I am doing this prior to converting to Mpeg2 then I would not know how much to crop? Jerry you suggest feeding that to cce well I was hoping to configure avi 2 xxx to do what I am trying to do here.

Well you don't have to use CCE, you just mentioned it and its a good mpeg2 encoder. Autocrop (http://len0x.leffe.dnsalias.com/autocrop12.zip) is a good filter to use in avisynth for the cropping off the black bars then just use something like lanczosresize and resize it to the appropriate resolution. If you are trying to author this to DVD then it needs to be 720x480 NTSC or 720x576 PAL. If its for SVCD then just 480x480 or 480x576.