playback problems

[John Culleton]

would the ‘widescreen movie display on 4:3’ setting in DVDlab cause this if set to ‘letterbox’ instead of ‘automatic set by player’ ?

[Michael Sacci]

There is so much missing info here.

What aspect is the video? How was it set in the authoring? What type of TV does the client have? What is his DVD player set on?

[John Culleton]

video is 16:9 SD ntsc and DVDlab is set to that, clients DVD and TV is a panasonic (not sure of the model) and i’m not sure what the settings are?

is there a specific setting on a DVD player to recognise 16:9 or 4:3?

my DVD player and TV seem to do it automatically

[Chaz Morgan]

It could be a number of things but the usual ones are either –

1/. Field dominance – the interlaced fields may be reversed on your encoded video. This causes a stuttering effect on CRT TVs or Plasma.
fix with https://www.videohelp.com/tools/Restream.

2/. Poor standards conversion from NTSC to PAL or PAL to NTSC.

3/. Clients dirty or old DVD player

4/. DVD stock incompatibality with clients player – DVD-R, DVD-RW

[John Culleton]

i did encode from pal to ntsc with TMPEG5, file was HIDEF .mov PAL and i had to convert to SD NTSC. original file was progressive so i kept it the same for the encode, i also encoded at just 5K

DVD’s (there are 5 of them) all play fine on my players here so i suggested he try them on some different players… waiting to hear back

[Andrius Simutis]

I recognize this is a month old, but if anyone is searching for a similar problem, here’s my $.02:
There’s a good chance that your client has taken their old DVD player which was connected to their old 4:3 tube TV and just plugged it into their shiny new HD set. If they used an HDMI cable, the player and TV would be fine. If they used an analog cable then the DVD player has no idea that it’s now feeding a 16:9 set and so it’s outputting a letterboxed image like it always did but the 16:9 HDTV is seeing a 4:3 input, so it’s boxed on all sides. Your client saw this and pushed the dreaded ZOOM button to fill the screen. Now you’ve got a 720×360 pixel image magnified up to a 1920×1080 pixel screen…yuck.

[John Culleton]

would they get the same by selecting auto instead of zoom?
i suspect most folks have their old DVD player connected to their new HD tv with analogue cables

[Andrius Simutis]

I suppose it would since the player wouldn’t “know” that it’s now connected to a 16:9 HD set and would still be putting out that lovely letterboxed image. The TV on Auto could default either way, and who can parse the thinking of the engineers who set those menus and defaults? I’ve found that they just as often default to the last setting I would ever want.

[Michael Sacci]

How would an engineer know what type of TV someone is going to hook a DVD up to? The first that a person has to do with and DVD player is set it up according to the TV they have. If they have a 16:9 TV they also have set the TV to how they want 4:3 video to look. If they are too lazy or to dumb to do that let them watch whatever they get. It is not an engineers fault, nor a DVD manufacturers fault. It is the viewers.

[Andrius Simutis]

Michael, Don’t get so upset…it was meant as a lighthearted jab at the vagaries of the Setup Menu. Of course all engineers are brilliant. Of course anyone who doesn’t know the correct key combination to bring up the DVD setup menu (only valid while a disc is not inserted) is completely at fault for not having their discs playback correctly. Of course, anyone who didn’t read all 460 pages of their owners manual would never know that this is even needed. Of course, anyone who is unable to properly calibrate their playback device does not deserve a DVD player.
Further evidence of the engineering department’s brilliance is the fact that no two remotes can share a common button layout or even call the same functions the same thing. That would be too easy for those stupid consumers who actually buy these products.