Forum Archive Home -> SVCD2DVD General -> Anamorphic DVD from Widescreen h.264 Video
| Anamorphic DVD from Widescreen h.264 Video | ||
| trueg posted 2008 Aug 20 01:43 | ||
| I have a bunch of wide screen h.264 videos that I would like to make into wide screen DVDs. The final destination is a widescreen TV, so the DVD needs to be anamorphic to take advantage of the full 720x480. I have no problem with the menu which is set to 16:9 and works correctly. The source h.264 video resolution is 720x400. If I let SVCD2DVD detect the aspect ratio, it picks 4:3 and adds black bars to the top and bottom of the video. If I force 16:9, the encoder still adds the black bars before encoding at as anamorphic. The resulting video is squished vertically because of the black bars that have been added to the 16:9 frame.
Is there a hidden setting or something that I can do to correct this issue? | ||
| ChrissyBoy posted 2008 Aug 20 04:55 | ||
| Can you post some screenshots to illustrate please? Can you put a sample somewhere for me to look at? | ||
| trueg posted 2008 Aug 20 13:34 | ||
| Attached are the following screenshots.....
Menu - correctly set at 16:9 Original - snapshot of the original 720x400 h.264 video non-forced aspect ratio - snapshot of the encoded video when aspect ratio is not forced to 16:9 16:9 forced aspect ratio - snapshot of encoded video when aspect ratio is forced to 16:9 Ideally I would like the 16:9 aspect ratio without the added black bars. 
 | ||
| trueg posted 2008 Aug 20 13:39 | ||
| ChrissyBoy, what type of sample would you like? I can use a HEX editor to grab a chunk of either the original h.264 or encoded VOB. | ||
| ChrissyBoy posted 2008 Aug 29 17:27 | ||
| I would like the original mkv file. (makesample in the toosl folder should do the trick). I need enough (duration) to replicate the issue. | ||
| trueg posted 2008 Sep 05 12:55 | ||
| I used makesample to make a 5 MB sample of my h.264 mp4 file. Let me know if this is not long enough and we can arrange to transfer a longer sample by another means.
sample.mp4 | ||
| trueg posted 2008 Sep 05 16:08 | ||
| I think I may have found something.
After posting my sample, I decided to test it using just the sample (instead of the whole file) and found that I no longer had the problem. The resulting video was correctly encoded as anamorphic wide screen. I then tested the whole file and again no problem. All along I have been using SVCD2DVD to put four 45 minute episodes on a single 4.5 GB DVD-R (using Auto Fit). After I determined that a single 45 episode encoded correctly, I tried two and again no problems. I was going to try three and decided to jump right to four and noticed that the AVI2MPG line in the log changed. 1 episode: ...AVI2MPG: 9000kbs Full - D1 2 episodes: ...AVI2MPG: 6200kbs Full - D1 3 episodes: ...AVI2MPG: 4000kbs Full - D1 4 episodes: ...AVI2MPG: 2904kbs Half - D1 FS TV I assume the 'FS' in the last line is what is causing the problem. For some reason AVI2MPG is being told to handle the video as full screen. Am I on the right track? | ||
| trueg posted 2008 Sep 15 11:09 | ||
| Any luck ChrissyBoy?
If there was some way to force AVI2MPG to use HALF - D1 instead of HALF - D1 FS TV, I'm sure it would fix the problem. | ||
| ChrissyBoy posted 2008 Sep 15 11:58 | ||
| Mmm - that would make sense. Can you post the log from this run please? (radio silence due to holiday BTW...) | ||
| Jikchung posted 2008 Sep 15 16:56 | ||
If I remember correctly...some players will not recognize Half D1 as widescreen/animorphic. You may need to add borders top and bottom (letterbox). That was the old work around. | ||
| trueg posted 2008 Sep 15 17:47 | ||
| I suppose that would make sense why it defaults to FS once it drops down to half-D1.
So, what about full D1 at 3 Mbps? It looks great at 4 Mbps with full D1, could 3 Mbps be that much worse? ChrissyBoy, is there a config setting somewhere where I can lower the threshold of where it switches to half-D1 to say 2.8 Mbps instead of what ever it is now? | ||
| Jikchung posted 2008 Sep 15 18:59 | ||
| The results can be quite good depending on what you are viewing on and personal taste. If you want to try full D1 at a lower bitrate this registry hack may still be valid for lowering the bitrate threshold:
http://forum.videohelp.com/topic285195.html#1411554 Note that the registry position is for the older 2.0 version of S2D, adjust accordingly. | ||
| trueg posted 2008 Sep 15 22:04 | ||
| Yup, creating a string type registry in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Badger I.T.\SVCD2DVD 2.5 called FULLD1BITRATEMIN with a value of 2500 fixed the problem (not really a problem, more of a feature that I wanted to change).
Thanks for the link Jikchung. Thank you for originally looking into it for me ChrissyBoy, any plans to work this into a future release? trueg | ||
| ChrissyBoy posted 2008 Sep 16 03:17 | ||
| Well the consensus is that bitrates under 3Mbs warrant half D1 resolution... Hence the setting.
And yes half D1 doesn't support 16:9 Anamorphic (http://www.videohelp.com/dvd): 
So you have the info – either reduce the full/half D1 threshold or put less duration on the DVD. As you say having a setting so that you can change this easily sounds sensible. Thanks for you patience on getting to the bottom of this. CB | ||
| trueg posted 2008 Sep 16 10:47 | ||
| As a final note, I just wanted to add that in my case, the bit rate for four 45 minute episodes came in at just under 3 Mbps (2950 kbps in most cases, never below 2.9 Mbps). I use CCE medium low 2500-3200 kbps matrices that I downloaded from somewhere around here and the quality is very good (at least as good as the original 250 MB h.264 740x400 videos) on my 1080p Sony 46". |
Login/Register to our forum to be able to post here.