Is there a tool somewhere that I can use to easily determine what height and width to use when setting the resolution for ripped DVD's? Most of my dvds are widescreen and all the info I have seen so far has been for Pan and Scan.

Do you mean for the final video?

Or what step are you on?

Yeah...I am using Virtual Dub and trying to figure out the doggone resolution.

Well, if you already have the source file.. Check file info and look the the frame size... Then if you want to calculate the new frame size... simply use this algorithm. It works for all sources including wide and non widescreen. (if your film is not one of the standard sizes I gave as examples...)


Say you have a widescreen source... lets say 480 x 208 or something like that...

Your final width should always be 320.

So take 320 and divide it by the width of your widescreen film.

which in this case is 480 so

320/480

This gives 0.6666667

now multiply by your movie's height, in this case it's 208

0.666666667 x 208

This gives us 138.666 or 139 rounded...


so our resized film would be 320x139, however...

Divx requires that your width and heights for your film be mutiples of 16...

So divide 139 by 16

139/16 is 8.6875

Which rounds to 9

So 9 x 16 gives 144

So you should set the height to 144

so your final film size is 320 x 144...

If you are following the guide I wrote, just enter that into step 1 instead of 320x240.

(Note this does do some stretching of the picture, but it's basically unoticable... If you downloaded that test file I put up, it's encoded this way and slightly stretched, but not noticably at all...) If you really want to be anal about it, it's possible to correct it completely and just put black space into the file, but that takes alot more calculation.

Cool. I can do that Now another dumb question: Since it is widescreen I want to view it landscaped. Do the height and width numbers be switched, or does rotating 90 degrees using the filter automatically take care of that?

Is it possible to use a smaller resolution and be able to view the movie with PMVP?

The answer to both questions is yes...

the rotate doesn't care if it's widescreen or not, it just put everything into landscape mode.


And yes pocketMVP will play smaller sized files... it can zoom in...