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View Full Version : Black bars and subtitle problems


Special Sauce
13th May 2004, 20:11
I just purchased a Panasonic DVP642 and would like to start ecoding movies to CD-R to play on it. However I'm having some problems which are preventing me from starting. I am working with the region 1 version of Melena. I have tried using Xvid and Divx.

1) When I "preview" a file it shows the black bars encoded on the video itself. Since my DVD player will add those and I'd like to be able to play these on a widescreen TV someday that is a problem that I can't live with. How do I get AutoGK to encode only the video without adding black bars?

2) There are two english langauge subtitles available in the drop down menu. One is labeld, "English - WIDE." The other, "English - LETTERBOX." I assumed that "wide meant it was for the widescreen version of the film and "letterbox" was for the film when viewed with the black bars added; so I chose "wide," since I didn't think I'd be encoding black bars, but when I "preview" this it shows it with both versions of the subtitles:angry:?!?! The same happened when I chose the "letterbox" option.

The only way I could get it to display only one subtitle was by selecting "no subtitles" in the drop down menu, then selecting "display only forced subtitles" in the advanced menu. The problem with that is it showed the "letterbox" subtitles which are encoded over the black bars, which I don't want encoded in the first place.

3) This is something you may not be able to answer, but here it goes. When a video is encoded 640x480 the DVD player does not scale it properly and the tops and bottoms are cut off. Since I record a lot of TV shows I'd like to encode them in a way that the full information is shown on the screen. Is there a way to adjust the resolution so they'll show up properly on my TV screen? 4:3 by the way.

4) This is a dumb newbie question so be nice :). How do I adjust my Xvid or DivX settings that AutoGK encodes with?

Special Sauce
13th May 2004, 20:26
Well oddly enough I found the answer to my subtitle question in the AutoGK faq. Strange place to put it :D. However I still need help on all the other questions.

Thanks a lot!

Outerspacelord
13th May 2004, 20:54
Originally posted by Special Sauce
Well oddly enough I found the answer to my subtitle question in the AutoGK faq. Strange place to put it :D.

Hehe ... :)

manono
13th May 2004, 21:42
Hi-

1. The black bars you see in the Preview are added by the player. The .avi will have all the black cropped away.

2. That one you already got the answer for, right?

3. The Autocrop shouldn't be cropping off the top and bottom. Is it cropped off when you watch it with the computer? If not, then it's only cropped when played in the DVD/MPEG4 player to the television? Then it's an overscan problem. You lose 5-10% of the viewing area to the TV's overscan. It has nothing to do with AutoGK.

4. You don't. If you want to tweak the settings, then use GKnot.