Anyone ever done letterboxed WS to anamorphic WS conversion?

Some early DVDs had a letterboxed widescreen picture instaed of the 16:9 anamorphic picture common nowadays.

When played on a widescreen TV, the picture must be "zoomed" to display correctly - this reduces quality, especially when playing NTSC discs on PAL equipment as the number of displayed lines of resolution is so much less than the equipment was designed for.

I was thinking that the picture on the DVD could be re-sized (precise bi-linear or whatever) and re-encoded to make a new anamorphic copy. I know this would introduce a bit of blurriness, but I wondered if this would be more acceptable than the scan line effect you get with a zoomed picture. Or is it just my telly that does that?

[DaRat]

IMHO when watching lb-ed ws movies it's way better to resize them and reencode than zoom in on your dvd player. It'll be either blocky or blured depending on your equipment. If you do a reencode with cce + avysinth (imho use lanczosresize for this, gives the best result for the eyes), maybe throw in a few filters for this and that you'll end up with a almost perfect copy. O'course details wouldn't be as rich as on a true original ws dvd (since you're upsampling) but waaaaayyy better than the zooming crap.

$.02 worth

[hendrix]

all your ??? can be answered
here

[jdobbs]

You may also want to try using LanczosResize() with AVISYNTH. I saw an considerable quality improvement when I started using it for this type of resizing.