[mythtv-users] Trimming 16:9 to 4:3 for DVD burning

Nick knowledgejunkie at gmail.com
Sat Aug 27 23:58:37 UTC 2005


On 8/27/05, John Goerzen <jgoerzen at complete.org> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I've recorded some material from my pcHDTV 3000 unit that I'd like to
> burn to DVD.  It's 4:3 material.  Trouble is, it's got black bars
> encoded *as part of the picture frame itself* on the left and right
> sides.  This seems fairly typical when stations broadcast a digital
> version of an analog source.
> 
> Any ideas how I can remove these bars prior to encoding on DVD?

If the black bars are an actual part of the frame and I wanted to
remove them, I would open the MPEG2 video in a frame editor (I'd
always use VirtualDubMPEG2 in Windows for this) and crop the frame,
and then resize the remaining frame back to 720 pixels. I would then
serve this videostream back into an MPEG2 encoder tool and then replex
the audio/video streams back together.

However, if playback is going to be on widescreen device, you may just
want to leave the clip 'as-is' as the clip should be played back in
4:3 format. Certain zoom modes on TVs and projectors may also
eliminate most of the bars from the clip without having to re-encode
the material.

> 
> Also, any ideas how I can encode HDTV content to DVD in general?

Again, you'd need to resize and re-encode the video to a DVD-compliant
resolution (720x480 for NTSC, 720x576 for PAL/SECAM), choose the audio
tracks you want included, and then master the DVD. VirtualDubMPEG2
will let you the resizing, then another tool such as TMPEGEnc will let
you encode back to MPEG2 for DVD, and then a DVD authoring tool will
give you the ISO file for burning to DVD.

You can probably do all this automatically on the CLI in Linux too,
hopefully some the Linux video editing crowd can include the info.

HTH,
Nick


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