Home DVD player - loss of edges

[Steve251]

Hi Guys, A friend and I are trying to create a DVD that will play in all home DVD players from a PowerPoint Presentation. We have been fairly successfull so far - we used ppt2dvd to convert the PowerPoint show to VOD and then used Nerovision Express to write it to a DVD. Everything worked well with sound and transitions very acceptable the only problem is that we lose all four edges of each slide off of the tv screen. Anyone have any ideas or suggestions - thanks Steve London

[Experi-Mentor]

welcome to the forum

just a thought but, perhaps the dvd player in question doesn't support "progressive scan" (?)

[blutach]

You probably need to change the video attributes for the domain to 16 x 9, automatic letterbox.

Do this in PgcEdit: Load the DVD files created by NVE in (File - Open DVD - Navigate to the video_ts.ifo file), right click on the title and look at domain stream attributes. Change it as described. Save.

Naturally, these need to be on your hard drive and will need to be rewritten to DVD afterwards.

Regards

[blutach]

Remember also that DVD has certain standard picture resolutions that it must adhere to - see here.

Regards

[mastercontrol]

You "lose" the edges because of overscan. Basically all regular TVs have this overscan area, which is hidden from normal view. When you watch video on your computer, you see all the video, including what would be hidden in a TV's overscan area.

In broadcasting, when TV stations and production facilities create graphics for TV, they use what is known as the "safe title area", which is a space on the screen that it is safe to put titles. Since PowerPoint is intended for PC use (and PCs don't have overscan issues), you won't notice loss of edges when you're watching the presentation on your computer monitor.

What you need to do is fix the text on your PowerPoint presentation to accommodate that overscan area. Basically, just leave space around the left, right, top and bottom of the presentation screen with just the background/image filling the screen. That will allow the text to be seen on a TV. Another alternative (which I wouldn't recommend) would be to re-encode the video with black borders around the edges. TMPGEnc is one encoder that can do that.

[blutach]

To elaborate - the overscan area is about 2% top and bottom, left and right. Often, you'll find hidden buttons in this area.

Regards