[If two versions of this make it to the list, my apologies. I made a mistake with the from: address of the previous copy, and it appears to have been not sent out to the mailing list. Of course, having re-sent this (slightly edited) version, they will now both appear.]
Hello all, I have tried to help myself, and failed... tcprobe reports this for my input video: import frame size: -g 720x480 [720x576] (*) aspect ratio: 4:3 (*) However, the data is actually 16:9. When I first tried to author a DVD with this video, I set the aspect ratio flag in the dvdauthor.xml flag to 16:9. When I played the results disc with my DVD player, is displayed nicely on my CRT television, as the DVD player added the letterboxing bars above and below the image. However, on a second DVD player, the image was instead shown without the bars. The picture filled the screen top-to-bottom, making everything look distorted. Transcode can help, I thought. I consulted the man page http://www.transcoding.org/cgi-bin/transcode?Aspect_Ratio http://www.transcoding.org/cgi-bin/transcode?Calculating_Frame_Size_And_Aspect_Ratio and the recent email thread entitled "Transcode and resize" from this past February. This gave me the desired results: transcode -c :0:00.0-:0:05.0 -i video.m2v --export_prof dvd-ntsc --import_asr 3 --export_asr 2 -o test -Z fast But my understanding is that the "fast" option does not give ideal quality output video. But I can't get any of the other -Z options to work, for example this fails: transcode -c :0:00.0-:0:05.0 -i video.m2v --export_prof dvd-ntsc --import_asr 3 --export_asr 2 -o test -Z 720x480 with this the only apparent problem: **ERROR: [mpeg2enc] Vertical size is greater than permitted in specified Level Question 1: Do I lose video quality with the fast flag to -Z? Question 1a: If yes, how can I use the -Z option? Trying to find a solution, I went to the second page referenced above, and example 6 looked relevant, so I tried this: transcode -c :0:00.0-:0:05.0 -i video.m2v --export_prof dvd-ntsc --import_asr 3 --export_asr 2 -o test -Z 720x404 -Y -38,0,-38,0 My thinking was that 720 X ( 9 / 16) = 405, which is close to 404, and then I needed to add black bars 76 pixels wide to get back to the 720x480 frame size. Again, I got an error: **ERROR: [mpeg2enc] Vertical size is greater than permitted in specified Level Question 2: What am I doing wrong when I try to *not* use the -Z flag? Thank you for any suggestions, -Ben Blout