Resizing question for MPEG-2 gurus

[Pojken Purken]

I recently invested in a DVB-S card. The output is 480x576 (PAL 4:3). Of these 480 pixels there are 16 pixels of black bars, 8 pixels on each side of the picture. There are no black bars on top or bottom. How do I correctly crop and resize this picture? What does the DVB-standard say? Are the black bars "included" in the 4:3 aspect ratio?

Regards
PP

[auenf]

umm....

480x576 is PAL SVCD res, im pretty sure that DVB is 720x576 (just like DVD).

specific 4:3 PAL is 704x576, which is where your 16 extra pixels will be coming from, and you can crop them if you feel like.

Enf...

[Pojken Purken]

Thanks for the reply but the output IS 480x576, at least on some channels. Tried RAI2 f.e. and there the output was 544x576, left black bar 11 pixels and right black bar 8 pixels. Perhaps the higher resolution is there for 16:9 ...
Still I'm as confused as ever ;-) If someone with deep knowledge would like to comment on this I'd be grateful.

Just so you know what I'm doing...
1) Saving the raw PVA-stream
2) Demuxing it with PVAstrumento to mpv and mpa (the res is shown here)
3) Load mpv in DVD2AVI and save as project (res is confirmed here)
4) AVISynth --> Vdub (res confirmed once more)

Regards
PP

[Pojken Purken]

The plot thickens... now I get several other resolutions on different channels. PVAStrumento gives a comment on some of the resolutions, perhaps they can give some insight:

480x576 (2/3 D1)
528x576
544x576
704x576 (cropped D1)
720x576 (full D1)

/PP

EDIT: Can I assume that, no matter the resolution, it's always the complete 4:3 display that is present?

[hakko504]

Originally posted by Pojken Purken
EDIT: Can I assume that, no matter the resolution, it's always the complete 4:3 display that is present?
Yes.

A lot of channels use lower resolutions than D1 in order to save bitrate, as bitrate on Digital TV is limited. Fewer pixels means less bits are needed to encode material, plus it is faster to do real-time MPEG-2 encoding with fewer pixels. DVB officially only supports D1, cropped D1 and half D1 (352x576).