Which is yr preferred resolution when encoding video?

[Newbie123]

To those who resize their video during encoding, which is yr preferred resolution?

[buba king]

640x272 for a 1h30min movie for movies over this i usually use 576x240

[Acaila]

1-CD movie: up to 2 hours -> 640x...
2-CD movie: over 2 hours -> 720x...

[UHT]

640x XXX for normal films
512x XXX for anime and cartoons

[Migsan76]

I always use 640 x XXX

[DJ Bobo]

I do most of the time 1-CD rips, I take usually 512x...

[kagoru]

To those who encode their movies ALWAYS @ 640x or higher:
You don't get over 60% in Gknot compressability check, do you? That means the quality of your movie will be inferior.
On the other hand, when I encode at 512xsomething and get over 60% I have lost some details, right?

It's kind of a double mill, isn't it?
1) Keep more details and have lower quality
2) Lose some details and have higher quality

Am I right here?

[UHT]

yes thats right, thats exactly what compression (at least lossy compression) is about...

[KoVaR]

depends on Comp Check !!!

[Acaila]

Well, I use 800MB CD's, so 640x... and 720x... still give me high enough quality.

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by kagoru To those who encode their movies ALWAYS @ 640x or higher: You don't get over 60% in Gknot compressability check, do you?

Professional encoders like Acaila use tempsmoother (3) before resizing to improve compressability .... 640 * xxx is no prob for 1 CD encoding at very high quality then ... browse this section to learn more about it ... GKnot will offer this almost as standard, simply tick 'light noise' and 'insert filter before resizing', then go to edit and change the temsmoother (2,1) to (3) ... thats it ...

[Migsan76]

Acaila,

You have good results using 800 Mb CD's, like fiability and compatibility?

What is your CD-Record? I have a PlextorWriter 16x10x40x

[UHT]

i didnt know there were any people encoding proffesionally with divx4...at least not feature films :)

[NeVeRLiFt]

640x288
512x384

[kagoru]

Originally posted by ChristianHJW


Professional encoders like Acaila use tempsmoother (3)

If you use that blurry filter you're talking about AND additionally use divx4 to encode your DVDs, you will lose a LOT of details! And if you use billinear-resizing too, you will lose another great deal of details (suddenly your characters look 10 years younger than they are!).

Prove me wrong.

[Acaila]

@kagoru:

Bilinear is a big no-go for me. I use Sharp Bicubic on 2-CD rips and Neutral Bicubic on 1-CD rips. And TempSmooth(3) doesn't blur THAT much, just a little (better result using it before resizing). With the increased bitrate it allows I believe it's worth it.

NOBODY can claim they make high quality 1-CD rips without using any kind of noise filtering.

@Migsan76:
I haven't found a problem with these 800MB CD's yet (except when trying to overburn to 866, which they won't do, guess I'm stuck with 800). If you have a fairly recent CD player you'll be able to read it, which both me and a friend of mine who often watches my movies have. I have no idea how recent it has to be though.

I use an AOpen 24x10x40 burner for this.


And I'm not a professional, but I appreciate Christian's compliment :)

[UHT]

i can make high quality 1 cd rips without ANY noise filtering

my 24 min episode of futurama looks great on one cd :)

[ohliuv]

@UHT: lol :D

@Acaila:

Bilinear is a big no-go for me. I use Sharp Bicubic on 2-CD rips and Neutral Bicubic on 1-CD rips. And TempSmooth(3) doesn't blur THAT much, just a little (better result using it before resizing). With the increased bitrate it allows I believe it's worth it.
100% agree with you, I encode the same way

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by kagoru If you use that blurry filter you're talking about AND additionally use divx4 to encode your DVDs, you will lose a LOT of details!
... we were talking about 1 CD rips only ... as Acaila pointed out to you, the big difference here is to use it before resizing filter ... give it a try and report here .... i'd love you to prove us wrong here, taking into account the big workload we have been doing to find out what settings are best ....

And if you use billinear-resizing too, you will lose another great deal of details (suddenly your characters look 10 years younger than they are!)
Nobody here doing good rips will use precise bilinear since neutral and soft bicubic are available in GKnot ...

]Originally posted by Acaila NOBODY can claim they make high quality 1-CD rips without using any kind of noise filtering
Sorry my friend but i cant agree here. Although this is the DivX4 encoding section there are a nr. of DivX3/nandub freaks here also ( dont know why this is :cool: ) and they can do very good 1 CD rips without external filtering !

The reason for this si simply ( as -h had been pointing out i guess ) that DivX3 is based on MPEG4V3 and both will have a kind of noise filtering implemented by default in the codec. One of the reasons why both DivX4 and XviD may beat DivX3 for 2 CD rips .... they offer more details ;) ...

[kagoru]

Originally posted by ChristianHJW

both DivX4 and XviD may beat DivX3 for 2 CD rips .... they offer more details ;) ...

Are you saying that DivX4 keeps more details than divx3? If so, then I don't agree with you. DivX3 has the most details as doom9 pointed out in his comparison already. That is true for all my rips (1 and 2 cds) I made so far; divX4-movies are all blurrier than divX3.

[Acaila]

ChristianHJW wrote:
The reason for this is simply ( as -h had been pointing out i guess ) that DivX3 is based on MPEG4V3 and both will have a kind of noise filtering implemented by default in the codec.

Well, doesn't that just prove my point? I did say any kind. :D

But I get your point.


Even though, if I were doing a 1-CD DivX3 SBC rip I bet I would still use a noise filter (at low setting) to get rid of those awfull macroblocks :)

[kagoru]

I did a compressability check by using temp_smoother(3) and afterwards the sharp bicubic resize filter. But I still don't get 60% @ 640x272. Would you recommend to lower the resolution until I get 60% or encode @ 640 anyways?

[Acaila]

That depends...what audio bitrate are you using? Maybe you can cut on that, but don't go below 128 kbps ABR.

The compressibility test (CT) doesn't take into account the credits' extreme compression, so the quality of your movie will always be higher then what you would think based solely on the CT.

Also, not using Vobsub, but SubRip for your subtitles can give you a higher quality movie (because SubRip's subtitles are much smaller in size, thus you save space).

And try Neutral Bicubic instead of Sharp.

[serbersan]

Well after do some test and encode enough movies I have to be totally agree with doom9(about the lost in crispness), generally, it's better to lower the resolution than use a tempsmoother filter but I agree about the advantages of TempSmoother.

But I'm not agree with Christian and Acaila, I think it isn't recommendable the use of a TempSmoother with a setting 3 generally, only if you are going to do a really long rip and you know the quality won't be good but al least you won't have any macroblock.

The lost in crispness and sharpness in faces when talking or others details are very noticed with such a heavy filtering like 3, but yea no macroblock, and excelent quality in others details,

I usually do 1 CD rip without filtering(and without go lower than 576) if the quality doesn't satisfy me I use TempSmoother (1) if it isn't enough I'll go to 2 Cd rip or TempSmoother(2) but the effect of tempsmoother 3 is very very noticed to think the rip is good, and enough to not recommend it to do a good rip, and the same to TempSmoother(2).

Depends heavily of the movie but in my last 3 1CD rips the quality of my rips was better without filter than with a TS(1). You only have to see the faces with a minimum movement, and in a movie usually there are many faces. ;)


Just my 2 cents

[ChristianHJW]

Originally posted by serbersan
I usually do 1 CD rip without filtering(and without go lower than 576) if the quality doesn't satisfy me I use TempSmoother (1) if it isn't enough I'll go to 2 Cd rip or TempSmoother(2) but the effect of tempsmoother 3 is very very noticed to think the rip is good, and enough to not recommend it to do a good rip, and the same to TempSmoother(2)

Do you filter before or after resizing ? Note that this makes huge difference. tempsmoother(3) before resizing has similar ( small ) impact on crispness as tempsmoother(1) after resizing from my experience ...

[DJ Bobo]

Well well, I see there is many "50-cm-in-front-of-the-monitor-watchers" here, TemporalSmoother is blurring?! where?! I never noticed a blurring effect, and I do it always after resizing.

I think you are exagerating a bit, watch your movies like normal people!

Ideal viewing distance: 5 x size of the monitor or TV.
That means if you have a 17" monitor, watch at 2 meters! and if you still can remark a blurring effect because of TemporalSmoother, then I must go and check my eyes!

[serbersan]

Do you filter before or after resizing ? Note that this makes huge difference. tempsmoother(3) before resizing has similar ( small ) impact on crispness as tempsmoother(1) after resizing from my experience ...

My problem is that I filter before resizing and it slows down my machine too much for my taste, but yes I always use it before.

I've done a rip of Brother with TempSmoother(3) and yes no macroblocks and the overall quality is great but in some movements of persons in dark scenes(appears ghosts) or when they are talking, on bodys, on every moment when appears human skin and a minimum movement the effect is very noticed.

I have done a 1CD rip of Replicant at 640x352 (90min) and the quality is great without filter but I'm using a Ts(1) to avoid macroblocks in some parts of the background. For longer movies a level 2 could do the trick. But I think when you use a level 3 is because you are trying to do a too much longer 1CD rip and yes the quality will be better than without the filter but not better than a lower resolution and a less level filter I think if you don't want to do this then you may have to go for another CD.

In another thead I put images from Dr T with filtering 1 and without filtering only lowering resolution, in this case I choosed the filtered version but the effects in some images were noticed and besides filter slightly changes the colours.

I respect very much your opinions ChristianHJW and Acaila but I think in these cases the opinion of the goodness of high levels of TempSmoother is exaggerated, there are too much scenes of faces and human skin in a movie to not respect them in favour of a good overall quality.

I think in not a simple trade off between overall quality and details in human skin(crispness).

Excuse my English.

Thanks, just my 2 cents.

BTW, ChristianHJW, I have followed in Powerdivx forum about the new ogg format to mux audio and video, and I have seen some people using it successfully. Where Could I get some guide or Howto about creating my own oggs movies???

[movmasty]

resize is an art..........
and there are some aspect of resize that you didnt note

1)use several smooth filters and bicubic resize in a nonsense
as bilinear is in itself a smooth filter,and often in a better way than proper smooth filt.
i like to use bilinear, and then,if i like more sharphness,enhance contrast with level filter.
ratio is important in resizing,so ,maybe, before to resize down,you could resize a little up to get the a 2:1 reduction.

2) ratio is also important in resizing while playing.
a magnify of 1:2 looks very better than non integer ratios.
i think that watched full screen a movie of 512xxx looks better than one of 576xxx on a 1024x768.
then think to screen res when planning a size for your movies.

3)about the source ratio, note that a movie at 640x272,is intrinsecally smaller than one at 640x352,a more comparable size for a 2.35 movie is 720x304,
but this doesnt match any screen res,need to be resized on the fly,
then you could try to go directly to 800x336,
and this isnt a real enlargement ,but still a reduction, as the minimum vertical res of such as movie is 362 linees(434 in pal).
in a pal movie, you could go so far as 1024x560 to keep all the details on the dvd.
however,encoding a 2.35movie in divx to watch on pc,i always like to do some pan and scan,and possibly a variable one,dont like that tiny line.

4)then i find anything under 640xxx too small,also 640x272 is a very small screen.
so if i need a size reduction, i do a frame decimation instead of resizing screen more

[DigitalWookie]

I encode at 352 x 192. Yay I am the lowest!


Okay before anyone comes at me for this, I have a good excuse... I'm getting ready for the Archos multimedia player coming out next month. It won't handle anything higher, but who cares... I'll be watching my movies and listening to mp3s on the train, at work, while i'm running, or even 35000 feet in the air... plus it has a TV output... yay... :D

[madoka]

I got a newbie question here: does any of this applies to encoding anime? In my (limited) experience it's compression artifacts between color boundaries, rather than macroblocks that creeps up with low bitrate. Also, crisp frames looks better an smooth frames in anime (at least IMHO), so does that imply that I should never reduce the resolution, or always use bicubic resize when downsizing?

[movmasty]

there is also a filter for anime boundaries: fxToon.vdf

[Slogra]

Depends on the length of the movie. I always try to put the movie on one cd. So a 90 min movie will be 704x??? and a 120+ min movie will be about 544x???.
I make 4:3 movies 512x384 or lower.

[madoka]

Originally posted by movmasty
there is also a filter for anime boundaries: fxToon.vdf

What exactly does this filter do? I downloaded it but there's no documentation for it.

[Triggerle]

Originally posted by ChristianHJW


Do you filter before or after resizing ? Note that this makes huge difference. tempsmoother(3) before resizing has similar ( small ) impact on crispness as tempsmoother(1) after resizing from my experience ...

I have tried this and after a painfully long encoding process (26 hours) I was not impressed.

It is true that there were no blocks visible and the picture looked as close to DVD as it can get...BUT: Whenever heads of people were in closeup they were perfecly sharp and as soon as there was any movement there was an ugly unsharpness. It looked almost like vaseline on the lens! I found this constant switching between sharp and blurry *extremely* irritating.

I reencoded the whole thing (took about 8 hours only) without any filters and am much more satisfied with the result.

(and yes, I applied the filter before resizing)

Triggerle

[jrmillerUT]

First off don't take anything movmasty says for the truth... This dude has been relaying false information in the nandub forums for quite sometime. I rip anime almost exclusively and i've never heard of that filter.

@acalia, I have made many GREAT 1 cd rips without the use of temp smoother or smart smoother or any other filter per se. With a clean DVD filters just ruin the source video.

When watching your Divx or Xvid or anything for that matter on a comp screen... ALWAYS drop your res down 640 x 480. This puts less of a strain on your CPU and also allows less CPU inserted pixels between the encoded avi. If you don't believe me try it. I've found that as long as you stay over 490x or so and make sure the quality is excellent that the rips look great no matter the viewing distance. I don't see the point in doing rips at above 640 because our monitors don't need that much resolution if the files are viewed correctly. I find that just automatically saying, "this movie is so and so minutes long, so i'll use this resolution" is only an approximation... ALL movies compress differently due to a variety of factors. eg. starship troopers (needed well over .3 bits/pix ratio in gknot to look 1/2 way decent) and SPR will not compress easily at all while Snatch and Enemy at the Gates fit at very high res on 1 cd. There is NO ONE SINGLE way to do everything correctly.

To anyone interested in ripping anime... do a forum search on the user Poopitypoop... and look for his thread entitled "still blocky in high motion" has some great ideas for anime along with his filter set.

[movmasty]

What exactly does this filter do? I downloaded it but there's no documentation for it.

here is what i have, a short guide,there is more on their homepage
http://flaxen.dynip.com/vdf/index.html

[jrmillerUT]

and again movmasty is being stupid in general

[Ookami]

In the future we will not tolerate any breaking of the forum rules. So ALL of you should read the new rules! No insulting! If someone post with wrong info, correct them with facts!

I have no motivation to do that anymore, because in every forum I see some "pros" posting ultimate truths about things that are relative.

But, probably everyone noticed the same trend.

BTW, Flaxen's VHS filter is now on Donald Graft's (neuron2) site...

BTW II, movmasty's theories are reminding me of a Italian member of the old Doom9 ezboard forum (r****i) ;) .

Cheers,

Ookie.

[movmasty]

well, i am the younger brother of that guy...... :cool:

[morphium_il]

Originally posted by ChristianHJW

Sorry my friend but i cant agree here. Although this is the DivX4 encoding section there are a nr. of DivX3/nandub freaks here also ( dont know why this is :cool: ) and they can do very good 1 CD rips without external filtering !

The reason for this si simply ( as -h had been pointing out i guess ) that DivX3 is based on MPEG4V3 and both will have a kind of noise filtering implemented by default in the codec. One of the reasons why both DivX4 and XviD may beat DivX3 for 2 CD rips .... they offer more details ;) ...

well if these nandub freaks are listening - i want to hear how they do it. yes, i know there is no one true way to rip any movie, but i would like to hear some people's descriptions of how they managed to fit a certain problematic movie on 1 cd with good quality - what filters/unusual nandub settings have you used, or any rules of thumb you have figured out from your experience.

i am currently trying to fit Big Lebowski on 1 cd (film is 2 hrs) and getting the typical tradeoff - no smoother gives me blocks and bluriness in the long shots, and w/ smoother i have faces washed out and some loss of color detail. if anyone has ripped the movie well on 1 cd or has experienced the same problems with a different movie - please let me know how you did it!

[morph]

[SirDavidGuy]

NOBODY can claim they make high quality 1-CD rips without using any kind of noise filtering.

I quite disagree. I used to use Nandub, and got good quality 1 CD rips with no noise filtering, and now I use DivX 5 to do the same (I'm one of those people who 'grew up' with Nandub, but was actually willing to try something new! Suprising, eh?). Although this is with Ogg, so I have a bit more space for video.

[Teegedeck]

Hey, a thread revived after 2 months of silence... :)

Filtering: No perfect solutions from my side, I'm afraid; clean sources won't need any, even for 1 CD, with bad sources you might be better-off with bilinear resizing, or a very low resolution with neutral bicubic, if you don't want a distinctively unnatural look. Unless you have to enhance contrast or something with a luminance filter.

Sorry to disagree with Christian and Acaila, you CAN see the effects of temp. smoother at setting '2' already, even if you put it before the resizer... It blends details, especially on faces, into one uniformously coloured mess. The GKnot preset of (2,1) is the highest I'd personally go for. :)

Christian, if you're listening, have you tried XviD with lumi-masking in both passes, already? Seems to work really fine, now. Sometimes it only gives 2% better compressibility and can as well be skipped, but I've used it for 2 CDs, recently, and found it very worthwile (a gain of 7% in compressibility - I could live with a bit of 'rings' around an actor in one scene where he was walking in front of a highly compressible background...). But that's only me, don't know how others would feel about it.

[diji1]

'owdy all,

About ...

bobotns: ... if you have a 17" monitor, watch at 2 meters! and if you still can remark a blurring effect because of TemporalSmoother, then I must go and check my eyes!

I usually sit/lie fairly close to my monitor when i "evaluate" something i have ripped. Yes of course it looks better if ur further away but if you are looking for "shit" artifacts and other mpeg 4 related things like blockiness etc i think that you will miss much :). I don't think that you can see well enough if u sit further away to pick some of these things out because obviously ur not seeing as much detail. ( remeber to take a break every 40-60 mins if u do this ppl - else ull have to get glasses later on, hehe ). I like to think that i am trying to make a backup that is as *close as possible* within constraints ( ie. filesize, res ) to the original dvd - so i usually am fairly frugal with filters. Sometimes the loss of detail is worth it just in terms of getting rid of macroblocks as mentioned before and compressability, other times i can put up with blockiness in favour of keeping detail. I certainly would agree that temp smooth at anything over strength 2 starts to eat into details and that's where it get interesting - trying different settings and filters and trying to get the best results in terms of image quality, details and compressability - all the while trying to get as close to dvd as possible.

jrmillerUT: I find that just automatically saying, "this movie is so and so minutes long, so i'll use this resolution" is only an approximation... ALL movies compress differently due to a variety of factors. ... There is NO ONE SINGLE way to do everything correctly.

100% agreed - it seems very restrictive imho to stick with one res based on length and i really wonder if you get the quality you might otherwise have had by using this "one-size-fits-all" method for some movies, unless filesize is no issue.

morphium_il yes, i know there is no one true way to rip any movie, but i would like to hear some people's descriptions of how they managed to fit a certain problematic movie on 1 cd with good quality - what filters/unusual nandub settings have you used, or any rules of thumb you have figured out from your experience.

well, i think you need to work this out for yourself. read up on settings for nandub ( hint: koepi's "nandub options explained" was damn helpful, cheers koepi ) and experiment. Try encoding a hard one with ur "default" settings and increasing/decreasing one setting by a large amount to try and gain an appreciation of what affect that setting has on image quality and compressability. Same goes for filters. I firmly believe that you need to watch the whole movie when using different filter settings - you can't just test on a section of the movie. Be prepared to watch ur divx many times to gain ur perfect encode - which may not be someone else's perfect encode if u know what i mean. As you say, there is no one way to encode a movie ...

Rules of thumb - well, as you prolly gathered, i don't really have any. One thing i do for all movies is encode the credits seperately at the lowest possible quality while still maintaining the ability to read them. Usually you can save 10s of megs for the main part of the film by doing this. Doing it involves a filter chain of coring set to max ( coring filter changes everything thats not white to black ), temp smoother at 5, bilinear resizing. Nandub settings usually are: bitrate = 300, min bitrate = 150, kf's at 25 seconds, min/start gauge=15, max gauge = 25 and minDRF = maxDRF = 30. Settings vary sometimes according to credits ( ie i need to read them ). I remember i picked up these tips for encoding credits at the divx.com forums from posts that Acaila and others made - cheers for one of the best tips i ever read Acaila! :)

[Acaila]

Sorry to disagree with Christian and Acaila, you CAN see the effects of temp. Smoother at setting '2' already, even if you put it before the resizer...
Back when I wrote that (seems like ages ago now :D) I was talking about DivX4. even a 'perfect' DivX4 encode is already quite blurry, so to my eyes using a TempSmooth of 1 or 2 didn't make a difference.
With XviD or DivX5 I would NEVER use this, because of the amount of detail these codecs retain it will show the effects that much earlier.

I mostly use XviD for my movies these days, and I want to keep all details crystal clear. So I hardly ever use TempSmooth anymore.

I remember i picked up these tips for encoding credits at the divx.com forums from posts that Acaila and others made - cheers for one of the best tips i ever read Acaila!
Wow!

Someone actually reads my stuff :D

[Teegedeck]

Hello Acaila,

nice to hear that you're using XviD, too - that means I don't have to bother testing DivX5.x myself... ;)

I just wanted to ask you how you feel about keeping the anamorphous resolution for 2 CDs. I've already posted something on that topic (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&postid=135184#post135184) - I lean a bit towards doing compr.-checks without a resizer, first, from now on. It seems even MPEG-quants 5 and 6 can look better with resize-through-player than MPEG-quant 3 in a sharp-bicubic-resized encoding. But I haven't tested it on enough sources, yet, to be sure about that. And also my old CPU gives me some stutter on the playback...

[Acaila]

Hi,

We had a similar thread over at the DivX5 forum (link (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=25500)). And another I think, but I can't find a link to that.

I personally wouldn't encode at the full resolution, but always resize to the correct aspect ratio. E.g. a res of 720x576 resized to 720x400 (16:9) saves a LOT of bits to enhance the frame. On 2 CD's using AC3 audio not many movies can achieve high enough quality when using a height of 576 against 400. Plus you'd need a high-end machine to play it back without sync issues.
In my opinion the decrease in overal quality (same bits on bigger frame) does not justify the increase in 176 vertical pixels when you're not gaining anything horizontally. And how often do you get a movie that is compressible enough to justify using even 720 res anyway?.

But I must admit I haven't tested player-resizing against filter-resizing a whole lot.

It seems even MPEG-quants 5 and 6 can look better with resize-through-player than MPEG-quant 3 in a sharp-bicubic-resized encoding.
1. I don't use quants higher than 5, and half of the time no 5's either (link (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24440)).
2. I would never use sharp bicubic in combination with MPEG. Although MPEG looks great, combining it with sharp bicubic is just overkill when considering they both increase the noise. Neutral bicubic is much more pleasing to my eyes.

[Teegedeck]

Originally posted by Acaila

1. I don't use quants higher than 5, and half of the time no 5's either (link (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=24440)).
2. I would never use sharp bicubic in combination with MPEG. Although MPEG looks great, combining it with sharp bicubic is just overkill when considering they both increase the noise. Neutral bicubic is much more pleasing to my eyes.

Yes, that's my usual line, too: Lower resolution with low quants is always preferable to high resolution with high quants. But I wouldn't have posted it if it hadn't amazed me. ;)
That even _MPEG_ (that usually looks worse than H.263 starting from, say, quant 5)-quants looked better here. Usually I adjust my resolutions also for 1CDs until I reach average quantizers of about 3-4 (which in turn means that I can use MPEG-quantizers if I feel that it looks better on that specific movie). For once, artefacts et.al. it seems were pretty effectively masked via resizing. And the higher count of lines beat a sharp resizer subjectively.

Yes, I think such compressible sources (about 50% compr. with lumi-masking) are rare. But it's interesting that the original DVD makes for a subjectively very sharp picture out of a blurry one by resizing in the player. Just reminded me that there are no rules that apply for all encodings.

[Dali Lama]

Teegedeck, you brought up an interesting topic and I want to look further into it.

Just to clear it up for me. You are saying encode at full DVD res and then resize in the player. Which means that the player must be able to resize. Duh. But which ones do that? Are you talking about the bicubic resize filter?

Thanks,

Dali

[Teegedeck]

BSPlayer has the best integrated resizer from what I've heard; you also can add user-defined aspect ratios.

It's nice that you want to give it a try. I think beginning summer is just the right time to overcome boredome by trying some unorthodox things. :cool: Perhaps I'll end up doing artificially softened anamorphous encodes... ;) ...Not. Just remember, like Acaila pointed out, highly compressible DVDs are rare and anamorphous playback produces a high workload on the CPU. I'd recommend lumi-masking in any case. Have fun!

[diji1]

Zoomplayer is another player with extensive resizing features.