can I make a svcd for both 4:3 and 16:9 TV's?

[chet]

For example - I am ripping and encoding a widescreen movie. If I encode it with d2s, I would normally choose

Aspect Ratio: 16:9, (borders added, encoded as 4:3)

what does this mean if I play it back on a widescreen TV?

[manono]

Hi-

It means that you'll have to use the zoom setting on your TV's remote control to scale it so it fills the screen left to right with correct AR.

If you intend to have them play only on your widescreen, you might experiment encoding to 16:9. You might need to use an extra CD to get the same quality, though. If you want them to play on both 16:9 and 4:3 TV sets, then continue to encode as 4:3.

[Nick]

You have 3 options for aspect ratio

16:9 Anamorophic - True 16:9 video like on DVD. However I'm 99.999% certain if you use this option for SVCD your DVD player will not play back the result. I believe for this reason unless you set your DVD2SVCD level to Advanced this option is removed.

16:9 Add borders encode as 4:3 - makes a 4:3 letterbox picture ie 4:3 with black bars top and bottom. When played to a 4:3 TV looks fine, when played to a widescreen you have to use the picture zoom modes to fill the screen.

4:3 no borders, Encode as 4:3 - squishes the video onwards from the sides to make a 4:3 picture. Your Widescreen TV will automatically desquish it and it will look fine. However it will be squished up on a 4:3 set and most don't have any zoom modes to overcome it.

In short - Playback on widescreen only, choose the last one. Playback on any telly but needing zoom modes on widescreen choose the middle one. No playback at all, choose the first one!

The only proviso I would add to this is that if you are trying to squeeze more than about 55 mins on a disc use the middle one anyway. The longer the video per disc, the lower the average bitrate. Since MPEC encodes changes between frames, and black bars don't change, you only use bitrate in the middle part of the screen where the film is instead of the whole film. So what you're effectively doing is sacrificing resolution to increase available bitrate. For longer movies the tradeoff is well worth it.

Q57 in the Q+A goes into more detail (did you check them out?, there's so much good stuff in there). When the anamorphic feature was first introduced many threads on the subject were either confusing or just plain wrong so a search may not have helped much in this instance.

[manono]

Hi-

I may have misunderstood you, Nick, but when I encode a 16:9 DVD to 16:9 SVCD, my DVD player and widescreen TV play them fine at proper AR. You just have to make sure the DVD player is outputting for a 16:9 TV set. Maybe other DVD players are different, I don't know. I expect that 4:3 no borders, Encode as 4:3 will work fine also for widescreen TVs, but I've never tried it. I don't know if it makes a difference, but I'm in NTSC land.

I just read Q57 of the FAQ. When I play the 16:9 SVCDs on my 4:3 TV with a different DVD player, they play fine, but without the black bars added. So people look skinny and tall. But I'll go fool with it some more and see if I can make it work, as your comments say it should.

[Nick]

You're just lucky! An SVCD encoded with the anamorphic flag will simply not play on many players. Failure to add the black bars on your 4:3 TV is a minor symptom! Many DVD players suffer violent picture shaking, monochrome output and so on rendering the SVCD useless.

Encoding 16:9 material as 4:3 no borders has exactly the same effect for everyone as anamorphic has for you, ie a 16:9 picture fills the 480:480/576 matrix without borders => eggheads on 4:3 TV but looks normal on a widescreen.

Letterbox 16:9, ie add borders and encode as 4:3, will play normally on a 4:3 but will need zoom on a widescreen. They are, however, the only format by which correct playback can be assured on any TV.

Avoid anamorphic 16:9 SVCD encodes like the plague!

[chet]

thanks guys :) Appreciate it.

Letterbox 16:9, ie add borders and encode as 4:3, will play normally on a 4:3 but will need zoom on a widescreen. They are, however, the only format by which correct playback can be assured on any TV.

16:9 Add borders encode as 4:3 - makes a 4:3 letterbox picture ie 4:3 with black bars top and bottom. When played to a 4:3 TV looks fine, when played to a widescreen you have to use the picture zoom modes to fill the screen.

which zoom function? dvd remote or tv? will it look ok, or will it look "zoom'ed"? I don't have a widescreen tv (as yet!).

[Nick]

All (afaik) widescreen TV's have this zoom function (albeit under a variety of names).

Basically a 4:3 letterbox picture can be stretched to fit the 16:9 screen removing the black bars top and bottom. The aspect ratio will be absolutely correct so it will not look strange.

So if you want SVCD's which play perfectly on any compatible dvd player, on either a 4:3 or 16:9 tv, always encode using "16:9 (borders added encode as 4:3)"