A bizarre format conversion - help!

[LTR12101B]

My new DVB-T card/software records an anamorphic 16:9 squished into 704x576.

Target player, a VCD/MP3 portable (DAV311).

I tried Nero, and while I'm sure I set "scale & clip" (maybe it slipped to "scale & fill" - have to do another one to check), I got letterboxed format!

So either I messed up that setting, or it did just a 2:1 reduction, full frame, and marked it as widescreen (is that possible in VCD?).


Then played around with Virtualdubmod, and found that cropping 110 from each side and scaling to 352x288 seemed to work out right for size... but then is there any alternative to making an intermediate AVI, which would be quite large to avoid any other losses - frameserve?

My first thought was actually FFMPEG, but I couldn't find any crop/scale options there, at least, not identified as such.

The complication, is that unless the "compressed widescreen" is automatically adjusted for, seperate h/v scaling is required.

[ChickenMan]

All VCD's MUST be 4:3, there is no such thing as a 16:9 VCD. The viewing picture may appear to be 16:9 but black bars top and botton simply convert it to 4:3.

DVD2SVCD will convert them to VCD fine for you, just select the aspect ratio option "16:9 (Borders added, encode as 4:3)" and it will automatically sort the a/r out for ya. See the DVD to VCD Tutorial for further info.

[LTR12101B]

And it doesn't care that the 16:9 is already width compressed - though as I found out later, frame aspect ratio, and image pixel ratio don't have to be the same, as the pixels are not necessarily square.

And if there is no way to flag a VCD as 16:9, I must have got the wong option in Nero, most likely with a misplaced flick of the scroll wheel.

The Nero VCD result (letterboxed) was not bad - encoded at 50% of realtime, under 30 minutes for a 1 hour recording - quality ok, but sound sync could be better - off by enough to notice if you looked, but not glaringly. Nero's MPEG2 encoder may be junk, but it seems the MPEG1 is not bad.

Time to check out some totorials now though, as some greater flexibility (I'll have to try the player with some things like XVCD) would be most useful.