DVD Encoder Parameter Calculator
 

I don't know how many people here encode their own DVD's but recently a friend of mine had a problem. Usually recorded movies are in a standard 4:3 display something like 320 x 240 or 640 x 480. Or if you have a fancy camera 16:9 display aspect ratio. So when you put these movies into a DVD encoder program, the standard settings usually work. However, problems arise when the aspect ratio isn't by default 4:3 or 16:9. In his case the aspect ratio is one of the commonly used ratios in cinematography which is 2.39:1. Which meant that the display is actually somewhat vertically slimmer than 16:9. Ipso facto you see more stuff to the sides. So when he encoded the people came out looking like one of those kung fu movies where they're all skinny and tall (that's because of poor PAL to NTSC conversion). As I'd encoded DVDs in the past he asked me if I knew how to fix it. I couldn't quite put it into words how to fix it as I had forgotten and I wasn't so sure my math was correct either. After a couple of trials and errors I figured out how to do it correctly, and I decided to write up a Flash application that would do this process automatically.

Things to keep in mind:

1. The app assumes that you want to maintain the aspect ratio of the original movie
2. The app assumes you want the movie centered, and not askew somewhere on the screen
3. The app assumes that the physical ratio (pixels width / pixels height) is the actual display ratio of the movie
4. If the display ratio is different to the physical size ratio then enter the display ratio of the original movie
5. Padding is placed there in case you want to add some to your movie so that the physical tv borders don't crop parts of the image
6. The image at the bottom displays an image which is proportional to the DVD format of 720 x 480 viewed at 3:2, the white area is the move, the black area is the padding
7. If it's all white that means the movie fits entirely within the region without any padding
8. The resulting numbers are: aspect ratio, movie width x movie height, horizontal padding (left and right are same number) x vertical padding(top and bottom are same number)

DVD Encoder Calculator