Make 16:9 movie into 4:3

[resloan]

Being very new at this I am guessing that I would crop, using AGK, the sides to change the AR? I tried the "force" option but this stretched it out of shape. I did try a manual crop, setting the sides to 40, and leaving other defaults as is, but this caused an error in the encode. Any help appreciated.

[Inspector.Gadget]

Why do you want to do this? You're stuck doing one of the following:
1) Display the picture with the wrong aspect ratio, making everything look weird.
2) Crop the picture a good amount horizontally and throw away a lot of the picture.
3) Shrink the display size of the picture and letterbox it.

Maybe there's a better to way to achieve what you're hoping to accomplish by doing this type of conversion. Why do you need it in 4:3?

[resloan]

I don't have a wide screen tv and the pix look too small.

[resloan]

I'll go for option 2. How much would I crop it? If pic is 720x480 would I crop it to 640 - 40 off each side? Does threshold=0 mean to crop all, or?

[Inspector.Gadget]

No commercial DVD is 720x480 square pixels. All are anamorphic. Your TV probably has a setting to switch between 2 and 3 (and maybe 1).

[Ghitulescu]

:search:
This was answered to.

[CWR03]

You can still buy many movies in 4:3 format, which are "pan and scan" rather than just cropped. Someone has done work to let you see the subject of action rather than letting all edges of every scene get cropped. Many DVD players have the option to select "pan and scan" from the menu that allows a 4:3 display of a widescreen movie as well.

[resloan]

My old Apex player did. My newer Philips doesn't seem to offer this, nor my TVs. This would be a much better option though. But say I wanted to crop them in AGK, how would I set this up? I have tried but get errors. I don't have to crop completely to 4:3, but just to where the movie is not so thin.

[Inspector.Gadget]

I would resize horizontally to 853x480 and then crop horizontally to 640x480. There's a whole ITU-vs-non-ITU debate for pixel aspect ratio on authored DVDs, meaning that this may make the content slightly too narrow. 853 should be approximately the correct horizontal width for all DVDs with black bars of 8 on the left and right (crop these before resizing) but may or may not work for content of a native anamorphic width of 720 (no pillarboxing). If round things in the frame look too narrow, resize to 875x480 and then crop to 640x480. JDobbs and some other standalone device gurus know more about this than I do from working with DVD Rebuilder.

[CWR03]

What error are you getting? What is the title and region of the disk? How are you preparing the files before feeding them to AutoGK?