[MEncoder-users] DVD creation problem, settop player cuts off boarder

[Phil Ehrens]

karl-heinz-1950 at web.de wrote:
> 
> > The cutoff that you are seeing is actually being caused by
> > your television. It's called "overscan", and it's part of
> > both the NTSC and PAL television standards.
> > 
> > The solution is to scale down your image and add black bars
> > to correspond to the overscan... I can't tell you what
> > numbers to use for PAL, but for NTSC I scale to 656x448 and
> > add 32 pixel bars on the sides and 16 pixel bars top and
> > bottom. The bars are not visible when viewed using a settop
> > player and TV.
> 
> 
> First of all thanks. I am using PAL standard. My movie has PAL resolution, if I cut it down to less pixels and then add black pixels that means I lose on resolution, don't I? Isn't there any other way? What command do you use to do this rescaling (for NTSC)?

You lose on resolution but you gain on effective bits
per pixel of content... You're not wasting bits encoding
stuff that you can never see.

This filter chain is the one for NTSC video:

 -vf scale=720:480,expand=-64:-32:32:16

You can use it with mplayer to see what it does.