Aspect Ratio Not Displaying Correctly

[OneNut]

I'm in my post-newbie phase, means I know just enough to entirely screw something up and know that I screwed it up.

I have a 45 minute MPG clip that I'm trying to convert into an SVCD. The aspect ratio is 320x240. I don't want to change the aspect because I don't want to lose the quality by resizing it.

What I've done is, by using Virtual Dub, I resized the clip keeping the new width and height at 320 and 240 but I've expanded the frame to 480x480 and letterboxed the image. I'm saving the new file to an AVI using Huffy. Once the file is encoded I can play it back with just about any player and I see exactly what I wanted. The 320x240 AVI clip is playing in the middle of a 480x480 box.

Here's where the problem lies. I've used DVD2SVCD to encode the AVI to ad SVCD and I've used TMPGEnc to enocode to an MPEG2 file, and then used VCDEasy to make an SVCD image. Regardless of using DVD2SVCD or TMPGEnc, when I play the MPEG2 file, I get a 16:9 looking frame where the width is ok but the height makes the clip appear to be in widescreen. I've gone ahead and amde a disk with the files and the picture on my TV looks the same. Looks like widescreen.

I think I'm screwing up when I'm converting the AVI to an MPEG2 file.

How should I be encoding the AVI into the MPEG2 file? I've searched all of the guides and forums but I can't find anything that says how to encode a 320x240 file to an SVCD compliant file without resizing the clip (to maintain quality).

[LeonMcNichol]

Ok... first of all, SVCD is 480x480, but your screen is not square. So when you play it back, it stretches the side to fit your screen, thus correcting the square to whatever your TV is. (640x480? *shrug*) So when you encode a already 4:3 corrected, it thus gets stretched more. See? So, if you still are insisting on doing this (Don't see why, you should use VCD for that res.), just resize the original 320x240 to like 320x320 or 240x240, that way it'll get stretched right. Oh and an easy way to do it with TMPGEnc, just use the "Video arrange Method:" to "Center (custom size)", then just set it to 320x320 or 240x240. That way you can remove the huffyuv step.

For DVD2SVCD, you need to set under the frameserver tab, edit avs script as part of encoding. Then change the resize to:

BicubicResize(320,320,0,0.6)

And add a line:

AddBorders(80,80,80,80)

So yours will look something like this:

LoadPlugin("c:\mpeg2dec.dll")
AviSource("C:\movie.avi",False)
ConvertToYUY2()
BicubicResize(320,320,0,0.6)
AddBorders(80,80,80,80)

BicubicResize could also be BilinearResize(320,320) or you can change the B Value and C Value or bicubic resize.

Personally, I would make it a VCD with a slight overscan set up. Like this:

LoadPlugin("c:\mpeg2dec.dll")
AviSource("C:\movie.avi",False)
ConvertToYUY2()
BicubicResize(342,230,0.333,0.333)
AddBorders(5,5,5,5)

[OneNut]

The avs script worked. Also, I took your advice and skipped the HuffyUV. Everything came out great!

Thanks for your help!