Watching DIVx movies

[mobily]

Morning all,

I have recently purchased a DVD player with DIVx capability and watch them on my trusty old Toshiba 28ZD26P via RGB scart.

I have a few questions though regarding resolution and how best to display the movies. I understand that they are highly compressed .avi files and therefore when filling a 28" aren't going to look like a DVD but I seem to be having a few issues.

The DVD player I have (Toshiba SD190E) has view options such as fill, auto fit, height fit, width fit and original. When I display in original the size is scaled down into the middle of the screen and the PQ is spot on but the small size is annoying. When I auto fit, the image fills the screen and PQ not so good (understandably), however the image seems to go larger than the TV screen.

For example if there is a logo in the bottom right of the screen some of this will be cut off. It's as though the DVD player increases the size of the picture too much.

Is this a resolution issue as I would like to view the movies in 16:9 and can put up with the reduced PQ.

Many thanks

[Stuart Gray]

Have you set the player to 16:9 or 4:3?

Cheers,

Stu

[24 P]

you might need to use the zoom function on the dvd player or panel, I have to do this sometimes with lower resolution dvix or avis..

[mobily]

I have the DVD player set to 16:9. If I set to original the image fills the screen wide but there are huge black bars at the top and bottom.

Is it due to the resolution of the movie which I believe is something like 652 x 324 or something like that.

Does anyone else suffer this problem?

[Pedro Gomes]

I have that same problem with my Toshiba SD185EKB DVD Player and Mikomi 15LCD250 TV (a cheap 4:3 model from Argos). I'd like to always use the "autofit" mode, to scale the video to fill the whole width of the screen, as DivX / XviD videos come in a variety of resolutions (depending on the preference of whoever encoded the video). But "autofit" always results in a picture somewhat larger than the TV screen. Something I'm planning to try is to connect the player to the TV not by a SCART cable, but by "standard" video and audio cables. But I'm not putting too much hope on that.

[mobily]

There must be a way os resolving the issue so that autofit will fit the picture to the screen and will not enlarge the image to bigger than the TV screen itself!

[KBeee]

Sounds like normal CRT overscan. You could re-encode the video to add a black border around the original, without going over the usual 720 width limit.

[olpers101]

When i have to watch 16:9 resolution i just extend it from tv.

[Pedro Gomes]

These players being of the SD type, I think that, when "autofit" is selected, the picture is scaled to fit inside a 720x576 rectangle, while keeping the original aspect ratio. But my particular TV model can only display video up to 640x480. This probably explains why "autofit" always exceeds the screen: of the re-scaled picture, only the portion that fits in the central 640x480 rectangle is actually visible.

[Matt_C]

My Sony DVD player has DivX support, but is limited to displaying the film, in it's native aspect ratio, within a 4:3 "frame" - so you get black borders all around and a small picture in the middle. I can stretch this with the TV's controls, but of course, like anything zoomed as opposed to scaled, the quality suffers. Your DVD player may well also have this limitation.

A note on black borders. I saw the OP stating even when zooming the pic to full screen, that he still has black borders top and bottom. This is probably the aspect ratio of the film. Even tho the resolution of the file might be say, 1024x720, which is "full" 16:9, the original film is probably 2.35:1. On a DVD, if the aspect ratio is 2.35:1, the film is anamorphic, meaning the DVD player centres the picture, and adds the relevant black borders (basically, dead space) top and bottom.

On an AVI file, DivX, XviD etc, the file resolution is what is displayed - it's not anamorphic. So the borders have to actually be encoded into the picture, and become part of the film. It basically creates a 16:9 frame, centres the film in the middle touching each left and right side, and encodes the dead space top and bottom with black borders. So that when played back on a computer or TV, the aspect ratio is correct.

As for missing picture from the edges - this, as said, is typical CRT overscan