A couple questions about using MeGUI.

[TempestGarden]

I have just started using MeGUI to convert some DVD episodes to AVI file with the x264 codec. I am having a couple of problems that I was hoping to get some help with. Here are a couple of my scenarios...

The part with the picture screen and whether or not it's anamorphic kinda confused me a little. I was just gonna let the program do whatever it wanted with it instead of me changing the resolution or anything, but while starting the encode, it gave me a warning advising me to use "Resize to mod16" which I stopped the encode to change and then started it up again. The resulting video was kinda weird cuz it plays with some extra black bars on the left/right side of the video that I would then have to move the edge of the player inwards if I want the video to match the edges of the player... I'm not sure if that makes sense or not... I hope so. I also had cropped the video a little but when I selected "Resize to mod16" it removed my cropping. Strange...

Also, the thing that confused me and I think confuses a lot of people is the part were you either Deinterlace or IVTC. The program did two passes and decided that it was going to IVTC, so I let it and didn't fool with it. I think it also said that the DVD was a hybrid of NTSC and FILM if I am not mistaken. Well... the resulting video had all kinds of horizontal line artifacts throughout it... kinda like what you get if you are checking manually to see if you need to Deinterlace or not. Any idea what the story is there?

UPDATE: I did find out that since this is a "Hybrid" that I should try out something called Decomb's Decimate? I have no idea what this is or how to use it. Is there anyone that can give me a detailed description of HOW and WHEN to use this?

Since I didn't mention it before, these episodes that I am encoding are live-action and the DVD was made in Japan in 1997. So it is of course R2 and NTSC.

Thank you in advance, I really appreciate it! :D

[check]

The black bars on the edge is probably due to something going wrong with the muxing. You can read a definition on anamorphic in the glossary in the mewiki if you aren't 100% sure about what it means. As far as I know (and I've done no testing with this as I don't use the internal muxers), megui has no way of determining the final DAR during muxing and therefore just sets it equal to the resolution of the video, which with an anamorphic encode is obviously problematic.
The easiest solution for this would be to use an external muxing program and manually specify the DAR yourself. For avi, I suggest avimux_GUI; mp4, yamb+mp4box and mkv, mkvtoolnix.

The cropping removal, do you mean it just removed the cropping values when you changed to anamorphic and you had to readd them? If so, this is just a minor quirk and I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Deinterlacing: now this is the interesting part. The answer is... reading (http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/dvd-basics.htm)! Once you understand the two different framerates that can exist on a DVD, you can understand the problem whenscript creator finds a video which is half and half. You can either IVTC it and get jerkiness in the parts that were film, or you can deinterlace it, and get combing. When to use one and when to use the other, and even using decimate is out of my scope as I live in PAL land and dont have to deal with all that crap :D