Well, I've been beating my head to figure out how to convert 16:9 HD material that I download from Bittorrent to 4:3 letterbox on my crappy old non-widescreen TV.
Here is what I found to do... Videora is using basically ffmpeg on the backend with some options. Thankfully you can supply your own options in the software:
Go to Setup, and then click on the profiles tab. There you can supply "Custom FFmpeg Flags" to pass to FFmpeg.
What I have done is taken the material I have downloaded and computed how large the letterbox bands are supposed to be with some simple math and then changed the ffmpeg options accordingly:
For my media which is 512x272, I have found that it correctly displays on my tivo assing the Custom FFmpeg flag: "-s 720x352 -padtop 64 -padbottom 64" (without quotations of course)
This flag does the following:
"-s 720x352" - overrides the Viedeora directive (because it comes later in the command line options videora passes to FFmpeg) to allways format the video to 720x480 and makes is 720x352. The horizontal value will allways be 720, the vertical value will be 480 - top bar value - bottom bar value (480-64-64=352)
"-padtop 64 --padbottom 64" add the proper "letterbox bars" to the top and bottom of the screen. Adjust this accordingly for your widescreen video. I read someplace that this should be in increments of 16, but I am not sure why.
I am pretty sure that padding 64 is correct for displaying 1.88 Widescreen on 4:3 with 720x480, but someone might want to check my math... I've allready had a few cold ones!
Here is what I found to do... Videora is using basically ffmpeg on the backend with some options. Thankfully you can supply your own options in the software:
Go to Setup, and then click on the profiles tab. There you can supply "Custom FFmpeg Flags" to pass to FFmpeg.
What I have done is taken the material I have downloaded and computed how large the letterbox bands are supposed to be with some simple math and then changed the ffmpeg options accordingly:
For my media which is 512x272, I have found that it correctly displays on my tivo assing the Custom FFmpeg flag: "-s 720x352 -padtop 64 -padbottom 64" (without quotations of course)
This flag does the following:
"-s 720x352" - overrides the Viedeora directive (because it comes later in the command line options videora passes to FFmpeg) to allways format the video to 720x480 and makes is 720x352. The horizontal value will allways be 720, the vertical value will be 480 - top bar value - bottom bar value (480-64-64=352)
"-padtop 64 --padbottom 64" add the proper "letterbox bars" to the top and bottom of the screen. Adjust this accordingly for your widescreen video. I read someplace that this should be in increments of 16, but I am not sure why.
I am pretty sure that padding 64 is correct for displaying 1.88 Widescreen on 4:3 with 720x480, but someone might want to check my math... I've allready had a few cold ones!