Hi, I downloaded a movie recently with surround sound but the audio won\'t play on my computer. And since I\'m getting a DVD burner, I thought why not make it even more worthwhile watching and burn the movie onto DVD so that I can watch it on the TV. Well, the movie seems to be widescreen. The size of the AVI is 640x360. The black bars on the top and bottom are not present in the AVI. How do I know if this is anamorphic or letterbox widescreen? If I want to preserve this widescreen when I put it onto my DVD, how do I go about converting it to MPEG-2? I want it to look normal on the TV. In the past, the widescreen becomes to wide for some reason (what I meant to say was that the top and bottom black bars were too huge, thus making the video area too narrow). I am using TMPGEnc Plus for conversion.

Also, is there a special quality rate and other details to change in order to fit this movie onto one DVD-R (4.7GB kind) along with 4 other really short promos? I will be adding selectable subs and still menus if that contributes to the size of the DVD. Any help is appreciated!

Edit:
By the way, I am using a 4:3 screen TV, not a widescreen TV.  :!: So I want the results on the DVD to have the top and bottom black bars but have the video look normal like it is supposed to look.

I wanted to do the same as Sakuya (except for a widescreen TV).

Afconic, your post didn\'t really help, you see there seems to be 3 settings in TMPGEnc relating to \"aspect ratio\'s\", they are:

In the Video Tab
Aspect Ratio:
[ul]
[li]1:1 (VGA)
[li]4:3 Display
[li]16:9 Display
[li]2.11.1 Display
[/ul]

In the Advanced Tab
Source Aspect Ratio:
[ul]
[li]1:1 (VGA)
[li]4:3 525 line (NTSC)
[li]4:3 525 line (NTSC, 704x480)
[li]4:3 625 line (PAL)
[li]4:3 525 line (PAL, 704x576)
[li]16:9 525 line (NTSC)
[li]16:9 625 line (PAL)
[li]4:3 Display
[li]16:9 Display
[li]2.11.1 Display
[/ul]

Also in Advanced Tab
Video Arrange Method:
[ul]
[li]Centre
[li]Centre (keep aspect ratio)
[li]Centre (custom size)
[li]Full screen
[li]Full screen (keep aspect ratio)
[li]Full screen (keep aspect ratio 2)
[li]No margin (keep aspect ratio)
[/ul]


What the *?£$ is the difference between these? None of the guides/tutorials I\'ve read adequately explains them.
So for a 640 x 352 AVI file to an MPEG with 16:9 DAR, which settings and why?  :lol:

I\'d love to see a really thorough guide to TMPGEnc settings on dvd-guides.com  

Allright, in the first screen you select the DVD type that you want to create. As you can see this does not change the resolution as it is 720x576 for both 16:9 and 4:3.

So if you have a 16:9 movie select 16:9 and so on.

The second window contains the source file info. Usually it is detected automatically. If it\'s not, select te right setting for your file. Be carefull, if you movie is 16:9 but with black bars up and down the picture then select 4:3, if the black bars are removed then select 16:9.

About video arrange method, you should better select full screen, as it works OK for the 90% of situations. Complete the rest settings and start the encoding!

Thanks afonic, the penny has dropped.

Aspect Ratio is just a flag. Finally found a good article, from Doom9:

Each MPEG-2 Video stream has a DAR (Display Aspect Ratio) flag. The flag tells the player for what kind of target display the stream has been encoded. There\'s 4 values: 1:1, 4:3, 16:9 and 2.11:1. The first and last one are not terribly important since there\'s no TVs having these aspect ratios. A video stream having a DAR of 16:9 is designated for a 16:9 TV, but that doesn\'t mean it can\'t be used for 4:3 TVs. The same applies to a DAR of 4:3.

For the Source Aspect Ration, I imagine I would only use 1:1 (VGA) for 90% of the time.