Letterbox with TMPGEnc and Sony DVD Player

[aramh]

I'm having trouble getting my VCD's to play at 16x9 on a stanalone DVD player. I had MPEG-2 files on my computer which I converted to Divx. When I converted them, they were stretched to full 720x480, so in VirtualDub I resized the actual video to 720x405 and letterboxed the rest of the space.

Later I put these episodes on VCD and used TMPGEnc to do so (I burned them with Nero 5.5 to VCD). Essentially Nero and TMPGEnc did a fine job; the VCD's play fine on my computer DVD player and play in my friend's Sony DVD player. However, when I put them in my friend's player, it plays them at full screen, cutting off the edges. I really want to get these VCD's to play at 16x9. I normally wouldn't ask for help on such a mundane task.

I've tried everything I can think of:

Changing the source aspect ratio to 16x9

Center (Keep Aspect Ratio) (it kept the aspect ratio of 720x405 and
only recorded the middle of the screen.)

Centering with a custom size

Clipping the frame (adding black bars in TMPGEnc)

When I used the custom size tool, I noticed that the black bars could be eliminated by resizing the video to full screen. If I could make the black bars a part of the video, then the DVD player would not be able to hide them. Any advice would be very helpful. Thank you.

[htc10825]

try to adjust the settings of your tv-set and the dvd-player. In some case you can choice btw 4:3 and 16:9 on both machines. hope one of the combinations will get the desired effect.

gernerally the vcs will be play back at 4:3, the dvd player make the resize work. on some dvd player the 16:9 encoded mpg data would not be resized to the right format automaticlly. so simply change the setting on dvd/tv to force them.

[aramh]

I actually think I got the solution (though it baffles me why this works). I clip the frame--essentially letting TMPEG put the black bars back in, and then I arrange the movie to be in the center at a custom size. Thanks for the help (by the way, I tried changing the settings on the DVD player earlier and it only let me run it at full screen; my buddies TV is from the late seventies, so I doubt I can do anything there)