Ok I'm sorry to keep coming to you guys for help, but you've helped me every other time, so I'm back for more.

I got my DV bridge working, and I ripped something from the TV by plugging my Freeview STB into the DV bridge, producing a PAL DV file.

Now my problem is maintaining the aspect ratio, can somebody please tell me what the hell is going on - does DV mess up the AR straight away meaning I have to convert to the proper AR? I wanted to convert it to Mpeg-2 so I can make a DVD out of it, but when I converted it, the AR changed slightly (to 740x540 if I remember correctly, I'm at work now). This actually looked a bit crisper than the DV file!

Now I'm using Mac programs to do all this so I guess you can't help me there, but I just want to get the right AR - what is the correct ratio to convert to for a true 4:3 Mpeg-2 that will be DVD compatible? Or was it already in the correct ratio?

Hope you understand my question, this is frustrating the hell out of me!

DV captures everything (full frame), at full PAL resolution including the black overscan which is masked by the edge of your tv. What you need to do is crop this off (only small), its (clockwise starting at 12) 6, 12, 6, 10 I've found to crop the crap off. Then you have a perfect 1.33:1 resolution, or at least I do. Then even if it was broadcast in widescreen, you will have the correct AR. It's just a matter of cropping off top and bottom (left and right should be spot on) where appropriate to get any non-4:3 resolution

May I point out you've messed up your encoding though, 740x540 is NTSC Square Pix, your dv should have started as PAL 720x576 So you've accidently encoded your PAL source to NTSC which is a very bad thing to do




document on PAL and NTSC:
http://www.strata.com/support/3dmanual/ch13/ch13_7.html

Ok thanks for that, I'll try your cropping method soon.

The conversion to NTSC Square Pix is actually forced by the program i'm using when converting dv to mpeg2 for some reason, I'm going to have to look into that further. The original DV file is the correct PAL AR.

AR and bitrates fry my brain

If its your program, it will screwup everytime.

use CCE instead, it is simply the best thing to use! If you need more control over your output, then use TMPGenc... everything else are babies tools and bound to give you these problems



I think it *will be slightly squashed. Head over to scifi.dead-donkey.com -> series -> Babylon 5 and look at the DV I posted, compared to a correctly cropped and processed version. The way dv is captured squashes the ar a little bit.