Silly Question

[techreactor]

Yeah! I know its a silly question but better to be safe than sorry.

If I encode my DVD to 4:3 AS will I be able to play it on Widescreen (16:9) TV and vice versa.

btw, I have a 4:3 TV now but I am planning to upgrade it to a Widescreen TV few months down, so I dont want to re-encode at that point of time!!!!

So is it better to encode in 16:9 ratio now only or what ??????

[nwg]

As the DVD is 4:3, it will be still be 4:3 on a widescreen TV. Most widescreen TV's have a stretch mode for 4:3 to fill the screen. It can look horrible though.

So is it better to encode in 16:9 ratio now only or what ??????

Yes but, you will have to settle for black borders top and bottom on the 4:3 TV (DVD player set to 4:3 letterbox).

If you can encode a 4:3 pan and scan flag and set the DVD player to the same setting. The TV will zoom in the picture and move sideways over the picture. Then, when you get a widescreen TV, change the DVD player to 16:9 and the picture will look proper widescreen.