Re: [Dvdauthor-users] 4:3 menu's not showing correctly on a Sony Bravia 16:9 TV?

[Wolfgang W. <wol...@we...>]

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Francesco Peeters schrieb:
> Hi all,
>
> I have created a (PAL) DVD for my daughter's Irish Dance school's
> theater-performance.
>
> The movies have been edited, the menu's defined, all in PAL, 720x576,
> aspect 4:3... Ran DVDauthor and then burned a DVD of the result...
>
> When I play the burned DVD on my home TV (4:3) it works fine.
> When I play the burned DVD on my Dad's Pioneer Plasma (16:9) it switches
> to 4:3 and works fine
> When I play the burned DVD on my Mom's Samsung LCD (16:9) it switches to
> 4:3 and works fine
> When the dance-school's teacher plays the same DVD on her Sony Bravia
> (16:9) the top and bottom of the main menu are cropped (I'm not sure
> whether this also happens with the sub menu's... Getting information from
> that woman is like pulling teeth!)
>
> Her Bravia supports several settings.
> The settings 'smart' (default), '14.9' (I assume she means 16:9) and
> 'zoom' crop the image...
> 'wide' doesn't crop, but the screens are too wide (d'uh!)
> '4:3' is the only setting with which it works well...
>
> Obviously she'd want the TV to remain set to 'smart'... ;-)
>
I don't think, it's a question of the TV-Set but merely the
DVD-Player.or at leat the combination of both. I don't have a 16:9 TV
but my cheapo no-name DVD-Player has some options, how to handle 16:9
formats. So maybe you should also check the settings of the player.

> Is there anything I can do to get this piece of Sony junk to behave as it
> should?
>
> The dvdauthor.xml has "<video format="pal" aspect="4:3"
> resolution="720x576" />" after every "<menus>"tag
Maybe, by using the widescreen-option for the menu
(widescreen="nopanscan|noletterbox|crop", see man dvdauthor), although
this is ment for 16:9 content displayed on a 4:3 screen. But maybe
this could prevent the Bravia from "panscanning" the 4:3 content as well.

Another, more professional approach would be to define the menus in
16:9 format and adding two different subpicture-streams for the
buttons - one for letterboxed format, one for widescreen. Together
with the widescreen option mentioned above, you can control, how the
menus will be displayed and the button definitions will always fit to
the display format. This issue has been discussed in more details a
couple of weeks before in this list. Just search the archives for a
thread named "Widescreen menu subpictures on 4:3 displays" around mid
of june.

As 16:9 is more and more becoming the standard, it would generally
make more sense to define the default menus in 16:9 and taking care of
old 4:3 sets with the widescreen option and a second set of subpictures.

hth
Wolfgang

- --
Geek by nature, Linux by choice

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