I own a portable MP3/VCD Player (Egoman lv 300), and I soon had to find out, that it doesn't support the KVCD templates.
(won't play back VBR properly for one thing)
However the Andreas Q.Matrix sure did some magic to my encodings.
Since most of my sources are DivX movies that scarcely come with vertical resolution higher than 300, the drawback of not being able to use the double vertical resolution (since my VCD player doesn't support it) is acceptable.
However most of the movies have the NTSCFilm framerate of 23,x. And won't play back without stutter (judder, whatever) if encoded below 29,x fps. (any hints on this?)
So I began encoding them in 352x240, the standard NTSC resolution, and 29,x fps. And with widescreen movies that lowered the active (the ones not used for the black letterbox borders) vertical pixels well below 200... which I found dropped too much detail.
Then I read somewhere in this forum about using the native PAL resolution with NTSC framerate.
I tried that.
And it worked perfectly.
So for all of you, who can't get the 352x480 (or higher) NTSC templates to work:
You might try getting some 20% x-tra active vertical pixels by changing to the PAL resolution (352x28
and keeping the NTSC framerate, if your player supports PAL that is.
Another thing you guys might think about (dunno if it's been posted here before), is the fact that your TV might not display the whole picture. It's called overscan I think.
On my TV I get about 330x260 displayed pixels in 352x288 resolution.
Knowing this I have two ways to use this to my advantage:
(1) Simply cut the source borders, adding black borders all around (clip frame in TMPGEnc)
(2) Encode to the max. displayed resolution (to be on the safe side I encode to 336x264 for fullscreen and to about 336x200 for about 16:9 widescreen). (Important: the whole picture is 352x288, the lower resolutions are used in the Arrange settings -> Center (custom size))
What's the point?
Using method (1) I can use the bitrate formerly used for the useless (since not visible) overscan area to improve the visible pictures.
Using method (2) I now see the whole pictures and also win some bitrate for their encoding.
As I gather, some DVD's come with 16:9 enhancement, so all pixels are active pixels (i.e. used to display the pictures) and the black borders on top and bottom are added by the decoder.
My question to you Gurus is:
Is there a way to do this with a VCD?
If I could use the whole 352x288 pixels (which is the maximum resolution I can have with my player) and display the video on the center of the screen in widescreen format, all my dreams regarding resolution would be made true ...
) ?
