How to maintain aspect ratio/create letterbox when encoding

[nii]

Hey guys. I've just figured out how to encode my videos correctly (turns out I needed the old AMV encoder for 128x128), and I want to encode some videos I have. However they are in widescreen format. How do I maintain the aspect ratio of my movie, so when it encodes it adds the letterbox to the top and bottom rather than clipping off the sides?

Thanks in advance,

-Nii

[tadad1]

nii,
Widescreen is not possible at 128x128 you would need to use 128x96 for wide screen but you would still lose a little of the sides.

You can however overcome this by pre-process it with something like VirtualDub and crop the letterbox black areas and resize to 128x96 then convert it to AMV. Here is a sample DOWNLOAD

[nii]

Thanks alot. However is there a way to add an artificial letterbox in Virtual dub without having to recompress/encode the entire video (using direct stream copy)? Because that involves a loss of quality and takes alot of time.

If only Vdub can encode straight to .amv =P

[tadad1]

nii,

I rip all my DVD to avi using CloneDVDMobile (unfortunatly not freeware). Takes about 30 minutes for a full lenght movie.

Then I pre-process with VirtualDub (Resize, De-Interlace, Crop, Adjust Brightness\Saturation, Sharpen, reset frame rate to 16fps same as AMV to prevent hopping, adjust audio by -200ms as AMV converter causes a slight lag in audio sync ) and process without any compression. Takes about 15-18 minutes

Then convert to AMV.

I find I get better quality by pre-processing this way than with straight conversion. I posted a guide HERE along with screenshot samples.

[gam3r]

Thats a very good guide which i shall be using thanks. I hope your getting the recognition you deserve, its a great guide keep up the good work and thanks!