[Steve Keliher]

When viewing my rendered DVD’s on my widescreen TV, I’m not happy with the quality when compared with playing the avi directly from the camera. There’s only a tiny amount of pixelation but if I can avoid it then I want to.

I know that I’m “not going to get any better quality than what’s on the original tapes” but that comment has no connection at all to your preceding statement about rendering to DVD – surely you realise that rendering to DVD involves a fairly substantial compression and loss of quality.

[Steve Keliher]

I’m planning on playing the disc in a blu ray player and I want to use blu ray as it should result in less compression than a DVD – if my miniDV avi file is about 17Gb per hour, surely to compress this to about 4Gb to fit on a DVD would be poorer quality than putting it on a blu ray disc which could fit the whole 17Gb?

You say that “If you want a playable disc that looks great, make a DVD” but I should be prepared for “poor quality” if I render my miniDV avi to either AVC or MPEG2 to blu ray. Yet, surely, by making a DVD, I must render it to MPEG2, so why would that quality be better than rendering to MPEG2 for blu ray?

Good DVD players will play avi files, even ones compressed with things like DivX – does anyone know whether a blu ray player would play my avi files from miniDV if I were to simply transer them uncompressed to a blu ray disc.

[Steve Keliher]

No idea on the black border, sorry, but using trigonometry, to get 130 degrees, you need an x of -0.643 and a y of 0.766