I recently recorded a movie that was on tv with my dvd recorder,
It is a fullscreen movie & what I'd like to know is ...
Is there a way to convert fullscreen movies to widescreen?
either by compressing the top & bottom with avisynth & fitCD or
By simply adding fake black borders to the top & bottom of the movie?
Also does adding fake borders to a movie like this have a negative impact if the movie was then played on a widescreen tv?

The is no ther way than croping top and bottom. Everything else will distort the picture, the same way as a widescreen TV crops/distorts the picture to display a 4:3 TV show.

According to me, just forget.

You can try WarpResize that is in the SimpleResize.dll from trBarry (get it at avisynth.org). It will stretch the picture in a non linear way.

have a look at

http://home.comcast.net/~trbarry/Dis...x3_on_16x9.htm

and

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.ph...&postid=456544

My TV has something like that built-in, but since it only deals with the horizontal stretch it doesn't look as good.

Also if you allow for a little cropping and small black bars it will look better than trying to fill the whole screen.

As Dialhot pointed out, it WILL distort the picture. Only it tries to do it in a more "acceptable" way. You may find it useable, or not.

Thanks for the link, I was wondering if there was a filter that does this.

Yep, better is to keep a 4:3 source in its given proportion when encoding, means 4:3.

Most 16:9 TVs beside that dynamical stretching from 4:3 to 16:9 do also got a 14:9 mode where the Pic won't be distorted but cropped "a bit" at top & bottom, so all these filtering examples of todd barry are already implementated in newer 16:9 TV sets.

Imagine you would playback such a "4:3 modded to 16:9" source image on a 4:3 afterwars using the players internal Letterboxing ---> nonsense distortion.
Then a panscanning via the player on that modded 4:3 to 16:9 material would be inevitable.

THANKS!!