Converting Videos To Play on a Philip DVD Bottom Is Cut Off

[DJboutit]

I am converting videos to play on a Philips DVP3560 DVD Player bottom 1/2" to 3/4" of the the video is cut off how do I fix this?? I am converting these videos to mpeg2 avi and vob 720x480 4:3 or 16:9 with Freemake playing the video on a 18 to 20 yr old 19" tv. What do I need to do so a smaller part of the video at the bottom is not cut off??

[fvisagie]

Have you compared playback with software players on your computer, and ideally also with another TV and DVD player?

If no obvious pointers result from that, while I'm not personally familiar with Freemake it may help others help you if you posted short input and output samples, along with your settings and the steps you took.

[TheSkiller]

1/2" to 3/4" of the the video is cut off how do I fix this??You mean one half to three quarters of an inch on the actual TV (rather than more than half of the entire picture)?
If yes, this is called overscan and it's not an error, it's normal. You need to take this into account while producing your video – that means do not place important elements outside of the "safe areas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_area_%28television%29)" (<- read this ;)).

By the way, this is not related to the age of the TV, overscan is supposed to be done by any TV displaying standard definion content (arguably HD as well).


If it's too late to re-edit you will have to shrink the entire picture so that it approximately fits within the action safe area, adding black borders all around the encoded image (those borders will cut off on a TV).

[hello_hello]

I recall someone telling me a while ago that some DVD players overscan. I'm pretty sure it was someone who knows what they're talking about.

Is it possible, given CRT TVs don't let you disable overscaning, DJboutit is experiencing a double dose of overscanning? If so, I assume there'd be potential to lose a reasonable amount of picture, depending on how much overscanning they do.

DJboutit should check the encodes with a PC to determine of all the picture is being encoded properly before trying to work out why some of it's going missing.

As far as I know the DivX certified players should support 720x480 and display it with the correct aspect ratio if one has been set, but I don't know if that'd apply to .divx files only, or whether it applies to AVI and other video/container formats.

[TheSkiller]

I recall someone telling me a while ago that some DVD players overscan. I'm pretty sure it was someone who knows what they're talking about.Never saw one which simulates overscan, but if a player does it, it cerainly applies only if the player is upscaling the DVD to a HD format. This way the HDTV's overscan could be disabled so that the picture needs to be resized only once (by the player) and yet there's still (simulated) overscan so that dirty borders do not show up.

But there's no reason at all why a player should bother re-scaling the video for it's SD outputs to simulate overscan. That wouldn't make any sense considering you generally cannot even disable overscan on SD inputs unless you mess with the service menu.

Edit: However, The DVP3560 does have a feature called "screen fit", which seems is a function that tries to smart stretch videos to fill the sceen – sounds like nothing good. Try disabling that.
With screen fit, zoom/useless stuff™ disabled there should be no scaling at all, and the original 480 lines would be mapped to 480 analog lines (+ Blanking, making up for a standard 525 lines signal).

[manono]

Never saw one which simulates overscan, but if a player does it, it cerainly applies only if the player is upscaling the DVD to a HD format.
It was called 'pixel cropping' and the majority of DVD players do it, some more than others. This is distinct from a TV set's overscan. It was one of many comparisons done for DVD players in order to rate them. Unfortunately, the comparison page is no longer available. Here's what they have to say about pixel cropping in the description of the tests they ran:

Pixel Cropping

(Title 5, Chapter 89) pattern on Avia was used to see how much of the DVD image the player is delivering. To measure the pixel cropping of a DVD player, a display device is needed that has no overscan. This is a visual verification test.

In the NTSC system, it takes 52.65 µs (microseconds) to draw a scan line. It just so happens that it takes approximately 0.07407 µs to draw a single pixel. If you multiply 0.07407 µs by 720 pixels you end up with 53.3304 µs, which is 0.6804 µs more than the time it takes to draw a scan line. If you divide 0.6804 µs by 0.07407 µs, you end up with 9.19 pixels less than 720 pixels, or approximately 711 pixels.

Those extra pixels will be cropped from the sides, and there is no hard and fast rule where they come from. They can all come from one side or the other, or even be cropped from both sides. The degree of cropping will vary from player to player, and some players are even cropping from the top and bottom.

It is also possible for a DVD player to output all of the pixels. Computer DVD players usually do this because they do not have to conform to NTSC timing. This also would not be a problem if they followed BT.601 vs. SMPTE 170M timing.

We measured the cropping from all four sides of each player. We only counted the pixels using the YC output, and we made the assumption that both the YC and CAV outputs were the same.

DVD Benchmark Part 1 (http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_7_3/dvd-benchmark-part-1-video-9-2000.html)

[TheSkiller]

It was called 'pixel cropping' and the majority of DVD players do it, some more than others. This is distinct from a TV set's overscan. Indeed, it is. However pixel cropping is not what I was talking about; I assumed we are really talking about simulated overscan (i.e. the player enlarging/scaling the picture digitally, before outputting it). But like I've said, I never witnessed a player yet which does this. And it would only make any sense for the scenario I described (upscaling to HD and disabling the TV's overscan).

Pixel cropping doesn't change the size of the picture, it just masks Pixels with black at the edges of the analogue active image area which one wouldn't ever see anyway due to a TV's overscan – and that's why I wonder why...

It was one of many comparisons done for DVD players in order to rate them.

...the amount of pixel cropping is of any significance to the user? :)

[manono]

...the amount of pixel cropping is of any significance to the user? :)
I'd say so. It means that even if your TV doesn't overscan you'll still lose picture. And there are standalone DVD players - the Oppos, for example - that don't crop anything from the picture. Others crop very little. However, the authors removed the big DVD comparison page so I can't be more specific.