16:9 dvd to 4:3 divx with black bars (letterboxed) ???

[aka-digital]

Hi,

I am trying to backup a 16:9 DVD to divx using Gordian Knot. Everything works great but when I play my divx cd on my stand alone dvd/divx player the image is not right.
I know that I can resize it and add black bars for 4:3 resolutions using virtual dub but I wonder if there is a way in doing this using Gordian Knot. I don't want to re-encode the whole movie.

Any help is much appreciated.:confused::confused:

[manono]

Hi-

Are you sure it's really from a 16:9 DVD? Do both the DVD Decrypter Stream Information file and DGIndex (when creating the .d2v file) say it's 16:9?

When you open the .d2v in GKnot, and after cropping and resizing to low AR Error, you then hit View->Resized above the .d2v picture and scroll around, does it look normal?

When you play your finished movie on the computer, it looks normal?

Do you have the DVD/MPEG-4 player set up correctly? If your TV set is a normal 4:3 TV, are you outputting for a 4:3 TV. And if widescreen, are you outputting for a 16:9 TV?

If the answer to all those questions is "yes", then I'd say there's something very wrong with your standalone.

[aka-digital]

Hi manono,

Thanks for reply. The answer is yes to all the questions.
My DVD/MPEG-4 player is LiteON LDV 2001.

Should I understand that if the tv is a 4:3 and the DVD/MPEG-4 player is set to the correct output (4:3) and if the divx movie is 16:9 (my case 640x352) than the DVD/MPEG-4 will add the black bars for the correct resolution (the same way it does for DVD movies)?

Thanks again,

[manono]

Hi-

Oh, it's a Lite-On. Mine has the same chipset, and I don't have problems such as you're describing. I may have to eat my words.

But to answer your question, yes, with a 640x352 movie on a 4:3 TV set, the player should be adding some black bars (not very much) to the top and bottom. What does yours do, play it fullscreen so that people appear tall and skinny? If you hadn't already said that yours was set up properly, I'd say you had it set up for Widescreen TV output.

The DVD-R Help site reports a lot of problems with the player, but bad AR isn't one of them:

http://www.videohelp.com/dvdplayers.php?DVDname=LiteON+LDV+2001&Submit=Search&Search=Search&country=&orderby=Name

And back to your original question, yes, you can add black bars to your movie, but it will require re-encoding. You'll want to make it fullscreen 640x480, so Edit the .avs to add this line after the earlier cropping and resizing:

AddBorders(0,64,0,64)

That will add 64 pixels of black to both the top and bottom, making the video 640x480.

And after your DVD is converted to .avi, it's no longer 16:9, but 1:1. The player doesn't resize based on 16:9 the way it would for the DVD, but only scales it based on 1:1. This assumes that you used a 16:9 Input Pixel Aspect Ratio in GKnot, and didn't do anything stupid like set it for 1:1.

[len0x]

Originally posted by aka-digital
My DVD/MPEG-4 player is LiteON LDV 2001.


It can display whatever AR you want (I never met any other player that can do that!). Press zoom during playback, then with arrows you can adjust height and width of a picture. (so you can do Pan&Scan on divx sources quite easy)

P.S. By default the player stretches video horizontally a bit (at least on 4:3 TV), so you have to adjust it everytime you start playing mpeg4 content.