MPG Aspect Ratios

[sixgun]

Hi,

I have been looking into a way to get widescreen material recorded by GBPVR to play on a 4:3 tv with no widescreen mode, but in letterbox mode.

Anyone know how to do that?

This is via the MVP by the way. I have just tried out a freeview recording and it seems to display it, but crops the left & right of the 16:9 images, leaving the middle.

Ideally, i would like to see the black bars, to be sure i am not missing anything.

Obviously the easiest solution would be to replace the 4:3 tv with a 16:9 one, but i don't want to do that just yet.

I tried playing the MPG file in VLC and that seems to auto-detect when the picture is in widescreen and change it's window size, whereas power DVD doesn't do that. This is within the same MPG file !

I know there is a DAR (Display Aspect Ratio) flag for an mpeg stream, but that is on a per file basis.

Thanks.

[reboot]

F7?

[HtV]

Afaik that doesn't influence output to the MVP.

[djtaylor]

Hi,

I have been looking into a way to get widescreen material recorded by GBPVR to play on a 4:3 tv with no widescreen mode, but in letterbox mode.

Anyone know how to do that?

The only way that I can think of is to resize the MPG file using Mencoder or ffmpeg to something that keeps the ratio but not using sizes that the MVP recognises as D1 or quarter frame. I find that when I throw files of "normal" sizes, such as 352x288, it will resize to full frame. Likewise if you send it 640x480 but if you send it 608x456 it won't size it to full frame.

Then you can add the borders in mencoder to accomplish what you want. I have thought about this as a post processing option and while I have my ffmpeg settings set to correctly do this for avi files, that's ok because they're transcoded on the fly anyway. I really can't be fussed right now to resize and pad each MPG recording after it has finished. Maybe one day.

David.

[hasso]

Try this:
http://forums.gbpvr.com/showpost.php?p=9...ostcount=9
It works pretty good for my needs.

[jksmurf]

hasso got the forum correct, but it's a singlepost link, and Ton updated the thing a bit later, so you might need to check the latest one in the entire thread; it "should be" at the time of posting :-)

http://forums.gbpvr.com/showpost.php?p=9...stcount=18
k.

[djtaylor]

Try this:
http://forums.gbpvr.com/showpost.php?p=9...ostcount=9
It works pretty good for my needs.

Needs differ but it doesn't work for adding top and bottom bars to a 16:9 recording to make it display correctly on a 4:3 display. Instead it squashes it horizontally so that you get the whole picture but the result is distorted.

It does work ok if the original is an AVI but not if the original is an MPG recorded in 16:9 with a 4:3 target.

David.

[sixgun]

It seems that nothing exists that will add the bars top and bottom of a 16:9 recording for playback on a 4:3 screen.

With my freeview set-top box i have it set to letterbox on 4:3 display, so i can watch stuff on 4:3 screens. Is there an equivalent setting somewhere to tell GBPVR or the Nova-T card to record in letterbox mode like my set-top box does.

Or does the set-top box do something to the stream real-time if it's outputting to a 4:3 screen?

Many thanks.

[HtV]

Is the MVP setup for displaying 4:3, You can change/check this by using the hauppauge software to load the dongle you want to use, or to use the newest beta-dongle from hauppauge (seems to be stable), both will give you the option to choose 4:3 or 16:9 output to tv.

[sixgun]

I have tried with both 4:3 and 16:9 settings and i get the same result.

I am using a fairly old dongle.bin, dated 2005/03/22 19:04

If i use the newer one i have (2005/06/02 13:08) i get severe ghosting problems because it detects the TV has RGB scart, but the TV only supports S-Video through the scart!

It's beginning to seem like the best solution is a new widescreen LCD TV.