4:3 video to widescreen

[sulliweb]

First, obvious thing: I don't have an HD receiver at home. I still have the good, plain, old Dish network receiver. I recorded a show on its DVR. It was a widescreen movie on TV. I'd like to copy it off onto a DVD as they haven't put that DVD out for sale yet.

I have an easy way to record the video from my DVR to my computer. It makes it a nice, uncompressed MPEG file.

Though, does anyone know of a program that will easily take a 4:3 picture, crop off the black bars, and expand it to make it a 16:9 video?

I've messed with Roxio VideoWave... It's theorectically possible, but the interface for the zoom borders on uselessness, so getting it right is next to impossible. I can't even figure out how to do that kind of zoom in Pinnacle Studio, so no joy there. Any other programs out there for this sort of thing? Preferably something free, but I'll take any suggestions.

Any help anyone can provide would be appreciated. Thanks!

(Edit done because I can't seem to spell today... Sorry for the slight bump, just realized it)

 

[mstrze]

I cannot provide you with the exact procedure to do this, but I just wanted to say be careful what you wish for. If you did expand the SD 4:3 to fill up the 16:9 space and eliminate the black bars, you are essentially just zooming in on the picture and lowering what is already of questionable quality (comparing SD to HD of course).

Like I said, I would imagine this is possible, probably with a number of programs, but the results are not likely to be all that great as you will probably introduce a lot of video artifacts as a result of your zooming.

 

[blueroom]

Assuming it's a 16:9 video shown with black bars you can use Handbrake to crop off the top & bottom (letterboxing) to fit your 16:9 TV.

 

[bp1000]

Theoretically, you could use handbrake to set a custom anamorphic setting in the picture settings menu and set it to 1024 width to stretch it but you don't really want to re-encode it.

Not sure what file output you would want.

 

[sulliweb]

Yeah, I already know that it's not going to be the best picture quality, but from the playing around that I've done before with VideoWave, I don't think I'll lose too much compared to the SD signal that I already have. It's why I record it off of the TV in a high bitrate, uncompressed format (basically a lot of redundant information in the file). It gives me a little leverage in regard to zooming without losing too much quality...

I haven't heard about Handbrake being able to do that, so I may give that a try.

Thanks again for the tip!

 

[bp1000]

I recently backed up a load of american dad dvd's, shot in 4:3

I stretched them to widescreen as i can't stand 4:3 on a widescreen tv. You can tell quality is lost but the viewing experience is much better imo.

My DVD player / tv, stretches them anyway.

 

[AdrianK]

Assuming it's a 16:9 video shown with black bars you can use Handbrake to crop off the top & bottom (letterboxing) to fit your 16:9 TV.
Image

I know it's not really important, but just to clarify, that's a 2.4:1 image inside a 4:3/1:1.33 frame. 16:9/1:1.78 will consume a lot more of the frame than that.

 

[blueroom]

Well the process is the same, just going to still have smaller letterbox bars and a very low res image ~220horizontal pixels and interlaced source too, yeech.