How to create 16:9 DVD from 4:3 .tivo?

[eshayne]

I have a regular series 2 tivo which is getting non-HD content input from my cable box. Some shows, though, are broadcast (and recorded) as 4:3 widescreen (with the black bars at the top and bottom).

My question is - once I've downloaded those shows to my PC, what is the easiest/quickest way to create a true widescreen 16:9 DVD from them?

Thanks,
Ethan

[windracer]

Off the top of my head, I'm not sure you can.

But I found this (http://www.videoredo.net/msgBoard/showthread.php?t=1873) on the VideoRedo forums ...

[ACraigL]

crop and burn @16:9. No?

[Dan203]

You're way better off simply burning the show as is and kicking your TV into zoom mode to eliminate the black bars.

The only way to make a true 16:9 DVD is to crop and reencode the MPEG, using something like TMPGEnc, which will take a lot of time and reduce the quality of the picture.

Dan

[eshayne]

crop and burn @16:9. No?

I did give that a try, as Dan suggested using TMPGEnc. Unfortunately the result - even encoded at 4Mbps - is a noticably worse-looking picture. It's not awful, but it is noticably less clear/sharp. I'm not sure if this is due just to reencoding or also to the fact that the resulting picture is something like 680x360 - which then has to be encoded as 720x480 (or 714x480) in order to be DVD compliant. I suspect the resizing step doesn't help the picture quality either.

Thanks,
Ethan

[petew]

You could look at ffmpeg the docs are here (http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg-doc.html) I use -padtop -padbottom to trasncode 16x9 material into 4x3 for transfer to Tivo but there's no reason why -croptop & -cropbottom couldn't be used to go in the opposite direction. As mentioned in the videoredo forum this won't improve the quality of the final image and using the zoom mode of the TV or Video player will be just as effective. But if you don't have that option this should do the trick.

[Dan203]

I did give that a try, as Dan suggested using TMPGEnc. Unfortunately the result - even encoded at 4Mbps - is a noticably worse-looking picture. It's not awful, but it is noticably less clear/sharp. I'm not sure if this is due just to reencoding or also to the fact that the resulting picture is something like 680x360 - which then has to be encoded as 720x480 (or 714x480) in order to be DVD compliant. I suspect the resizing step doesn't help the picture quality either.

The problem is the resizing. Although the picture might look better if you went with 352x480 instead of 720x480. It's still DVD legal, and wont require as much resampling as using the higer resolution.

Dan