Need help correcting movie size

[juchima]

I'm having difficulty figuring out how to correct the movie size that shows when I play a DVD that I burn myself. Let me explain in full.

I have a few anime series that I'm trying to burn to DVD. The episodes are 20-25 minutes long and are encoded with Divx. I used VirtualDub to extract the audio and then used TMPGEnc to create a suitable mpeg file for burning. I do this process for each anime episode and then use Pinnacle Studio 8 to burn 2 or 3 episodes to a DVD. After burning I tested the DVD on my PC, using WinDVD Platinum to playback the DVD. The movie quality was excellent and the audio sync was perfect, so I thought it was a successful burn. Now here's my problem. I took the DVD to a friend's house to watch it and the movie was too big for the screen. I'd say about 1 inch around the entire movie was cut off. It was like watching the movie zoomed 1X. These movie are fan-subbed so the subtitles are partially cut off. How do I solve this problem?

Below is the link to the guide that I followed to convert the Divx movies to mpeg files.

http://www.lancey.info/tutorial/divx2dvd.html

I followed the guide up to the authoring point. As I stated above I used Pinnacle Studio 8 to burn the anime episodes to DVD.

Thanks for all your help in advance.

[reboot]

There's probably nothing wrong with your dvd. Did you attempt to adjust his player's playback aspect?
I freaked the first time I saw this. It played perfectly on my comp, perfectly on one standalone, yet appeared zoomed on another.
In the playback options on the standalone (a Koss cheapo), I set it to 4:3 letterbox, and everything fell into place

[juchima]

I'm pretty sure I tried every aspect ratio on the stand alone DVD players that I tried playing the DVD, but I'll try it again.

Thanks!

[juchima]

Tried setting the ratio but still looks zoomed.

[karyuudo]

crappy guide

Well, first off, that guide you linked to was kinda crappy. I have ALOT of experience in the Anime burning field and I ran into this very problem a while back. You have several options.

1) If you are too cheap to re-burn the dvds (those things are expensive!!!!!), then just change the aspect ratio of your .TV to 16 by 9. Not your player, but your TV (option is usually in "settings" in the main menu. Of course, this results in a picture that seems entirely too wide, but the subtitles are legiable.

2) If you are willing to reburn... Change the "Video arrange method" in the advanced tab of the settings menu. You could try 'full screen (keep aspect ratio)', this might fix the problem, but it only helped a little for me.

3) If you tried option 2 and the results aren't quite good enough, you can try the 'center (custom size)' option, and decrease the height by multiples of twelve. (Ex: 720 x 468 or 720 x 456....). Once you find the right ratio, it will play perfectly .

There is also one other recomendation I would make to you...
For the rate control mode (settings menu, video tab), CBR is a no-no. You can fit up to 11 episodes on a 4.7 gig DvD if you use 2-pass VBR instead (avg bit-rate 2000, max bit-rate 8000). I do this and there is no noticable decrease in the quality of the video. There are some major $$$ savings right there.

Well, I hope I helped. It's kinda hard to explain this in words, without pictures. Thanx for listening... and if u have any ?'s, feel free to ask

[juchima]

Thanks for all your help. I'm assuming that all the options and tips you gave me are for when I use TMPGEnc. Am I correct? Also, what program are you using to burn your anime episodes?

[karyuudo]

oops

Ya, that's for TMPEnc I guess I sould have specified that I use the pegasys TMPEnc dvd author software (available on the same site as the encoder) it's free too

P.S. Sorry for the late reply.