PVR150-TV capture wrong aspect ratio (768 'stretched' to 720?)

[Morpheus_xx]

Hi,

I have the PVR 150 since a short time. I like it quite much, but have a strange problem.

When I capture with the WinTV2000 software the picture on screen is ok. The resulting mpeg file looks strange: black borders on the left and right side and the aspect ratio does not match the picture in WinTV.

It seems that the card capture the image with 768x576 and then scales it down to 720x576 to be DVD compatible.

I would need the option to capture full 768 resolution because I further process the videos, or 720 like on screen with no black borders.

I use the latest driver and WinTV from here:
http://hauppauge.lightpath.net/soft...50_22_22292.exe

Strangewise after install the device manager still shows driver version as "22280" instead of "22292"?

Maybe someone can help me.

Thnx in advance,
Morpheus

File attachment doesn't seem to work, so see the screenshot here:
http://www.hauppauge.co.uk/board/attachment.php?attachmentid=113&stc=1

[The eDealer]

Same problem to me, any idea?

[Arachnotron]

That capture looks about ok to me. I count 12 pixels border on the left and 8 to the right, leaving 700 pixels of active video.
A PAL TV signal should be the equivalent of about 702 DVD pixels wide, so your cap looks right.

The active area of a DVD is wider than the standard PAL 4:3 active area. The difference is made up out of black pixels. Since on a normal TV these are out of sight (overscan) that does not matter.

Apparently the WinTV player does some cropping on playback.

Anyhow, most of this stuff is explained in the faq and in the capture guide.

[Morpheus_xx]

It seems it must be that way.

I was confused because my older BT878 card did capture at 768x576 with no black borders.

[Arachnotron]

I was confused because my older BT878 card did capture at 768x576 with no black borders. Yes, the BT878, depending on the driver you use, captures a slighly narrower part of the video signal. If you use the BTwincap drivers, it will cap 52 µs worth of signal, which equals 702 DVD pixels. With other drivers, it captures even less, typically about 696 DVD pixels.

The PVR apparently captures the whole DVD active area, so apart from the complete video area it also captures some of the blanking signal at the sides. That is not really a problem, in fact that makes for very easy DVD authoring since you don't need to do any resizing.

In fact, even if you were to have picture over the whole DVD width of 720 pixels, some brands of DVD players actually chop those off again and replace it with blanking signal again on playback! IMHO they are correct in this, since they do follow the official PAL standard in this.

Aspect ratio calculations can be messy. Luckily, the differences are often small enough nobody notices the errors on a TV :)