Re: DVD works fine in Xine; in physical DVD player left/right cut off

Ok, so I've done a ton of research and experimenting and it turns out
that my problems just have to do with the nature of creating DVDs and
have nothing to do with dvdauthor.  I apologize immensely!

I'll post some of what I found here, in case someone else comes
searching for the same info.

 * Letterbox on the widescreen TV: Turned out to be a setting on that
DVD player.  Once adjusted, it stopped trying to letterbox.  When put
in the DVD-player without widescreen, it would then letterbox
correctly.

 * Adding widescreen="nopanscan" seemed to help some weirdness.  In
frustration with the problem, I was doing a TON of experimenting:
burning lots of DVDs and throwing them away.  After solving the
letterbox problem above, the DVD was being displayed with even more
being cut off the edges (like 100px on each side), "nopanscan" fixed
that.

 * After the above two changes, everything on the digital widescreen
TV looked OK, except the 8px were still missing on both sides.  More
research has led me to believe that most physical DVD players will
always remove those pixels because on older DVDs they are black bars,
but most computer DVD players will show them:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan#720_vs._702_or_704

"Although standards-compliant video processing software should never
fill all 720 pixels with active picture (only the center 704 pixels
must contain the actual image, and the remaining 8 pixels on the sides
of the image should constitute vertical black bars), recent digitally
generated content (e.g. DVDs of recent movies) often disregards this
rule."

 * On the non-widescreen (fully analog TV) I was losing way more than
the 8px on all sides.  It turns out this is due to "overscan" which is
present on all analog TVs or even digital TVs when using older methods
to connect to them.  Ie. If you've got a digital TV connect connected
with HDMI, you're probably good.  Otherwise, you might not be.

Here is great blog about "THE OVERSCAN PROBLEM":

http://www.mastersofcinema.org/reviews/03lookingbeyond.htm

Anyway, the solution is basically going to be to move everything
important away from the edges.  I had some "pop-up" boxes with info
editted directly into the videos, that were align to the screen edge.
And I also hardcoded my subtitles because they looked really nice
(blended into the video, with anti-aliasing, shadow, transparency,
etc) and I only needed to support one language audience (its a DVD for
my family).

So, I'm moving my "pop-ups" away from the edge, centering everything
on my menu screen and using spumux to put the subtitles in so that the
DVD user can adjust their position.  The subtitles look pretty
terrible, but atleast they will always be on the screen!

I had no idea making DVDs vs videos for computer consumption would be
such different beasts!  Anyway, thanks for putting up with my long
e-mails.

Happy Hacking!
David.

2010/12/13 David Snopek <[email protected]>:
> Hello,
>
> This is my first attempt at making a DVD, so I'm a little
> inexperienced.  But I have quite a bit of experience editing and
> encoding video for playback on computers.
>
> Basically, I have a DVD with only a "Main Menu VMGM" and two video
> files.  The menu and videos are all ntsc, 720x480 with 16:9 aspect.
> My dvdauthor.xml file is attached.  Below I'll show the mencoder
> command I used for encoding the VOB files and some info from mplayer
> about the VOBs.
>
> Anyway, everything works perfect in xine on my computer.  The problems
> start in physical DVD players.  I have two different players and TVs
> I'm testing.
>
> Basically, a few pixels are cut-off on the left and right edge of the
> screen.  Also, one of the TVs is widescreen and can be set to 16:9
> aspect, but still shows the black bars on top and bottom (as if the TV
> were set to 4:3 while watching a 16:9 movie).  Other DVDs in this same
> player/TV that are 16:9 with the TV set to 16:9, won't show the black
> bars.
>
> Also, on one of the DVD players, I can actually zoom out (1/2x zoom)
> which allows me to see edges that are cut off -- but, of course, this
> isn't that useful because the whole picture becomes really small.  The
> other DVD player (like most) only allows zooming in.
>
> My original guess was that for some reason the DVD player thinks the
> menu/videos are 4:3 when they are actually 16:9.  That would explain
> left/right edges being cut off (4:3 is 704x480, it could be 8 pixels
> missing on each side, but hard to say for sure).  It doesn't explain
> the wide-screen TV putting the bars on the top and bottom, though.
> But I've got aspect="16:9" all over my XML file *and* I'm passing it
> in on the command line too, ie:
>
> dvdauthor dvdauthor.xml -v ntsc+16:9+720x480
>
> I'm using dvdauthor 0.6.18.  I read the ChangLog for 0.7.0 and I
> didn't see anything in there that would lead me to believe that it
> would help.
>
> Here is the mencoder command I'm using to generate the VOBs (my
> originals are mp4's: ntsc, 1280x720, 16:9):
>
> mencoder -oac lavc -lameopts fast:preset=standard -ovc lavc -of mpeg
> -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf -vf scale=720:480,harddup -srate 48000 -af
> lavcresample=48000 -lavcopts
> vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=9800:vbitrate=6400:vstrict=0:keyint=18:trell:mbd=2:precmp=2:subcmp=2:cmp=2:dia=-10:predia=-10:cbp:mv0:vqmin=1:lmin=1:dc=10:acodec=ac3:abitrate=192:aspect=16/9
> -ofps 30000/1001 -o output.vob input.mp4
>
> Which is basically a modified version of the recommend command line
> from mencoder docs located here:
>
> http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/menc-feat-vcd-dvd.html
>
> From the output of mplayer, I know that my VOBs are definitely marked
> with the 16:9 flag (see the "aspect 3" and the last two lines):
>
> Playing christmas2010.vob.
> MPEG-PS file format detected.
> VIDEO:  MPEG2  720x480  (aspect 3)  29.970 fps  9800.0 kbps (1225.0 kbyte/s)
> ==========================================================================
> Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
> Selected video codec: [ffmpeg2] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg MPEG-2)
> ==========================================================================
> ==========================================================================
> Opening audio decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg/libavcodec audio decoders
> AUDIO: 48000 Hz, 2 ch, s16le, 192.0 kbit/12.50% (ratio: 24000->192000)
> Selected audio codec: [ffac3] afm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg AC-3)
> ==========================================================================
> AO: [pulse] 48000Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)
> Starting playback...
> Movie-Aspect is 1.78:1 - prescaling to correct movie aspect.
> VO: [xv] 720x480 => 854x480 Planar YV12
>
> Is there anything I'm missing?  My OS is Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat
> on an AMD64 machine.  I created the menus and dvdauthor.xml using
> qdvdauthor.  I'm using everything from the ubuntu package repos.
>
> I tried exploring the generated DVD with PgcEdit, but I don't really
> know what to look for.  I don't know enough about DVDs to know what
> all that stuff is.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> This is meant to be a Christmas present, so I might end up finding
> someone with a Windows box and download some shareware to get the job
> done in time.  But I'd really prefer to handle it all my computer, if
> possible.
>
> Thanks in advance!
> David Snopek.
>



-- 
Blog: http://www.linguatrek.com
Product: http://www.bibliobird.com

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