I've been messing around with with DVD ripping/encoding a little bit the last few days for the first, so I've been doing a lot of research on it all, but I'm a little confused about something. Everywhere I've read says NTSC DVDs have a resolution of 720x480... but many of the movies I own seem to have a resolution of 853x480 instead. I think I read somewhere that it gets stretched to that resolution? I'm not really sure. But if that's true and it is getting stretched, does that mean I can encode the DVD to AVI at the standard 720x480 and not lose any quality? None of the programs I've used even allow me to encode to this seemingly obscure 853x480 resolution; I have to go with a width of 848 or 864, so either the aspect ratio gets a little messed up, or I lose a few pixels on the sides.
So what basically I'm asking is what resolution do I encode an 853x480 DVD at? Any further advice on this whole subject is also much appreciated. Thanks in advance.
720x480 is the resolution of all ntsc dvd's so that they can play on a standard TV.
What you have 853x480 in your videos is the aspect ratio of the movie. That's how the movie was originally shot to play in a movie theatre widescreen format.
The aspect ratio has to be in a multiple of 16, that's why your software wants to pick a ratio that ends in a even number.
When you have a video with such high resolutions 853x480, you usually have dvd's that have blackbars on the top and bottom.
If your original videos are avi, you can open them up in avidemux. If there are blackbars on the video, it was encoded in a nonstandard resolution. I always crop out the blackbars without losing any of the video scenes. The finished avi will be smaller example 702x366,608x256,592x336 etc always will be in a even number. These will be fine when converted to dvd for play on a standard TV.
