I remember seeing something here on this fourm about 16x9 Widescreen VCDs. Is it possible to have a 16x9 input file (such as 352x198) or should I just add black bars when encoding in the panasonic encoder? Thanks for any help or input

-- Jay (jlink84@yahoo.com), March 07, 2000

Answers

Yes I wrote some stuff a few weeks back but cannot find it in the archives.

VCD's are only designed to play on a 4:3 screen so you cannot get automatic sensing of the 16:9 format.

You can only produce a letterbox within your 352 x 240 frame and the Panasonic standalone option to add black is suitable for that. I produce a 352 x 216 in PAL from anamorphic source material edited in Premiere and add black to pad it out to the full 288 at the encode stage. In NTSC you need to pad a 352 x 180 deep frame to 240 deep. The 16:9 format is not arrived at by using 352 as the width, it must be based on the expanded width, ie 640*9/16/2.

-- Ross McL (rmclennan@esc.net.au), March 09, 2000.