How to set aspect properly?

[Ghitulescu]

I am not spending too much time on this but, as I said, I own a Pioneer and dot-by-dot (like with all other TVs with the same features) engages only the full screen surface (what DVD or any other analogue format has 1920 x 1080 pixels?) and does it, as its name implies only for pure 1920x1080 signals. I also own some Sonies. Some friends have Pannies.
That not all Samsunges can do what yours do can man simply find after a query in google, like I did -> http://www.reddit.com/r/Chromecast/comments/1j6fnn/chromecast_overscanning_on_samsung_tv/

The article (http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/27/hd-101-overscan-and-why-all-tvs-do-it/) where you got this info is a little bit misleading because they confounded overscan with some internal architecture of TVs.

In my circle of friends and relative we have no Samsung nor LG, these are considered (up to their really top models) to have a budget quality.

While probably all TVs can be set to display a HD signal without any scaling (it's not overscan), I doubt that all of them (or a majority thereof) can be switched to underscan in SD modus.

A TV with underscan will show the head switching noise like in the photo
http://ungraphic.com/stuff/videocapture/head_switch_bad.jpg
and to my knowledge, the standards require an overscan - if a manufacturer chooses to ignore them, well, good for him.

While I know that H.264 allows for a block size smaller than 8, like 4, the use of such small matrixes worsens the compression, which I believe was the initial reason why the OP decided to do this job, anyway :) And if I am not wrong, smaller than 8 matrixes cannot be used with interlaced videos, like anime DVDs.

I believe now the OP has all the info he needs to convert his DVDs into a format with no black areas, symmetrical in vision, and playable on his hardware :)

[hello_hello]

I am not spending too much time on this but, as I said, I own a Pioneer and dot-by-dot (like with all other TVs with the same features) engages only the full screen surface (what DVD or any other analogue format has 1920 x 1080 pixels?) and does it, as its name implies only for pure 1920x1080 signals. I also own some Sonies. Some friends have Pannies.

You said:
"Apparently there are TVs that can be set to ignore the overscan, I am not sure how spread are these, I personally have met none of them".

Now you're saying:
"I own a Pioneer and dot-by-dot..... and does it, as its name implies only for pure 1920x1080 signals."

So you have a TV that lets you disable over-scanning, but you've never seen a TV that lets you disable over-scanning. Okay.....

I said most 1080p TVs would let you disable overscanning. No..... I didn't specify you might have to be running at a particular resolution, but I thought that'd be stating the obvious.
In my case I think I can disable overscanning for 720p or 1080p, regardless of the input type.
Edit: I just checked, and I can disable overscanning when the HDMI input is 720p/1080p or 1080i and for the component input at 1080i/1080p although the manual goes on to say that at 720p the TV still overscans by one line for reasons unknown to me.

I assume you believe rather than connecting a player to a TV at 1080p and disable overscanning, for some reason it'd be common to connect a player at a source video dependant resolution and watch overscanning enable and disable itself according to the resolution of the video, but I seriously doubt that happens much, and anyone who wants overscanning permanently disabled would work out how to do it and connect a player at a resolution that allows it.

TV's with built in media players display video at their native resolution after upscaling it if need be, so a TV's built in media player would add black bars as required and while I'd need to check, I'd be very confident they'd usually do it with overscanning disabled.

That not all Samsunges can do what yours do can man simply find after a query in google, like I did -> http://www.reddit.com/r/Chromecast/comments/1j6fnn/chromecast_overscanning_on_samsung_tv/

We're not taking about watching Netflix or YouTube video.

The article (http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/27/hd-101-overscan-and-why-all-tvs-do-it/) where you got this info is a little bit misleading because they confounded overscan with some internal architecture of TVs.

Where I got the info? Okay....... if you say so.

While probably all TVs can be set to display a HD signal without any scaling (it's not overscan), I doubt that all of them (or a majority thereof) can be switched to underscan in SD modus.

Naturally, I thought that went without saying.
I also thought we were discussing 8-BaLL's particular viewing setup:
Since I will be watching the DVD through my WDTV live, which upscales the image to 1080p anyways, I dont think I should keep the black bars, do I?

While I know that H.264 allows for a block size smaller than 8, like 4, the use of such small matrixes worsens the compression, which I believe was the initial reason why the OP decided to do this job, anyway :)

You said:
"generally the sizes must be DIV 8 if not even 16".
Now it's about compression.
The worsening of compression from not using mod16/8 for x264 encoding is so negligible it's not a factor. That probably applies to all modern encoders. It's not 1990 any more. ;)