The video/movie files i got off bit torrent can't play very well on my standalone dvd player. The problem is that the video/movie seems stretched when played. I use winavi to convert the files to dvd video. In winiavi, there are encoding options in which i can adjust the aspect ratio to my liking. But i don't want to fool around with trial and error. Is there something i'm doing wrong that makes the video stretched when played on my dvd player? I used the automatic setting for aspect ratio.
If you're viewing 4:3 on a widescreen TV the picture will be stretched. When converting with WinAVI use the 'Adjust width' setting (in the Advanced options) to place a black bar down each side of the picture to give a more natural aspect ratio.
Hey, a current thread dealing with my problem! I've got a little video I was sent by my cousin a year or so ago. I don't know what he used to turn it into a .mpeg. It looks fine in WMP and Cyberlink DVD player. I used Cyberlink's Power Producer to turn it into a dvd. When I played the resulting video in my set-top dvd player the video was STRETCHED vertically! I promised my mother I would send her a dvd and I need to figure this one out.
My tv has an option called 16:9 enhanced. I turned it on and it squashed the video and added black bars above and below the video. All of a sudden the dvd looked great. It turns out that it is in widescreen format and PowerProducer isn't smart enough to add black bars to the top and bottom when making the dvd. My mother doesn't have an option like this as her tv is about ten years old.
I checked the properties of the .mpeg file in WMP while it was playing and it shows the aspect ratio as 16:9 and the resolution to be 640*360.
A friend has Ulead Video Studio 10 and said it was too complicated for her to use and just uses the software that came with her dv camera and dvd burner. She told me she'd sell me the program pretty cheap. I looked at it and it seems to have options for aspect ratio & resolution in several places. I am guessing that I can somehow use it to make a dvd that will play on a regular 4:3 tv that will look correct and have bars above and below the picture. After all, when you play a widescreen dvd in your player this is how the picture looks, it isn't stretched or anything.
She told me I can try to use it on her computer (she hasn't removed it yet, I think she wants me to as she isn't very computer literate) to make the dvd and if I can get it to work she will sell it to me. Just from quickly looking over the program I see that it looks pretty powerful and I am sure if I buy it from her that I will be spending some time reading up on it and practicing. But can anyone give me a basic walkthru on making this particular file into a normal dvd with it? If it takes as long as Power Producer does to rend the video for burning I will have her computer tied up for several hours. And that is for doing it once, I shudder to think what it would be like telling her that it didn't come out right & that I need to change some settings and try again. Not to mention I only have a couple of Verbatim discs left and the local store (Circuit City) only has Nextech and Memorex left in stock and I've read that if I use those I might as well try playing them without burning them first as they aren't much count.
I should make mention that I am pretty new at all of this (bet y'all figured that out already!). I just got an awesome drive. It is an LG GSA-H10L multi-drive. It is $49 at Sams Club. I thought that was suspiciously low (was trying to find a cheap cdrw for about that price at the time) so I checked on the 'net and what info I could find said it is a high quality drive. It is SUPER quiet which is a first for me, I thought it had stopped working but I just couldn't hear it. It reads AND writes cd (r and rw) and dvd (-r, -rw, +r, +rw, -r dual layer, +r dual layer and -RAM). I saw a review on it and it showed all speeds to be better than 90% of the drives tested (lots) and on par with almost all the rest. And the reviewer tested a bunch of burns from all the drives with some kind of disc scanning sofware and reported the error rates for this drive to be the lowest he had ever encountered. Hmm... SOLD! It also burns labels on LightScribe discs, I know it is a slow process but I installed the latest "lightscribe system software" and the contrast utility as recommended and it isn't too bad. I have a set-top hard-drive-dvd-recorder (Panasonic DMR-E85H with the updated "Japanese" firmware I found) that I use to record/edit/burn stuff from tv and I made a DVD-R of the first six Doctor Who episodes (from BBC America after I edited out the commercials) with a lightscribe disc. I stuck it in my computer and found a dvd-pic on the 'net of the same thing and burned the label. Looked great! It burns at 600dpi so the better the pic, the better the results. Took about 25 minutes but I was web-surfing and didn't mind. I read that if it isn't dark enough I can stick it back in and redo it and it will be perfectly aligned due to the indexing stuff on the disc so that is always an option. I wouldn't use it for everything as the discs were expensive (over $1/disc in a 15-pack for HP DVD-R). I wouldn't expect to use it in a hurry like burning a mix-cd on the way out the door to play in my car - if Circuit City ever decides to actually stock Lightscribe cdr media instead of just spreading out all the other stuff to cover the blank spots on their shelf where the ls stuff _should_ be sitting. <GRR> I finally have a computer burner and they won't stock dvd-ram so I can transfer from my set-top Panny to my computer for re-authoring with better menus & custom stuff and reburning or putting back in the Panny. They only had the one 15-pk of HP ls DVD-R media, they haven't had any more and my friend says she almost never sees it there, they don't seem to want to stock the ls cdr stuff or ls dual layer - or any decent non-ls media either. Lots of Memorex, Sony, Nexxtech, ESA(?). No Tayo Yuden, no Verbatim. I can find Verbatim at Sams Club but no one has ever heard of TY. I dunno, I live in what is supposed to be a city, seems like it has big-city crime (don't park your car where the crack-heads can find it, don't forget to lock up your house). Oh well, Circuit City sells lots of LS-enabled and dvd-ram burning/reading cd-burners, dvd-burners, and set-top recorders. Maybe I'm missing something... But I am rambling, turns out I've been up too long searching the 'net.
I spent some time on this site (love it) right after I got my cdrw too or three years ago trying to figure out how to make video cds but the quality was junk and the pictures looked funny and then my burner stopped making good burns so I gave up on it all. Now that I have this multi-drive I'm back and will be reading more and more on good old AD but I feel like a guppy in the ocean (or a man who just fell out of a plane about 1500 feet above the ocean and knows he will soon be in deep - and I can't swim, metaphorically or literally) with all of the information. I don't know enough to know what I don't know yet. Err, y'all know what I mean. I will be searching the site more as I learn enough to know what I need to be actually searching for. So far my searches have either returned nothing or enough information to fill my basement if I printed it all out... It's a trip, I guess old posts don't get deleted here much.
Thanks,
Wes (aka Catfish, if ya' know me you know why, if not, don't bother asking <GRIN>)
