[Phranken9]

I'm a new owner of a superdrive equipped mac, and after having burned several data DVD's, decided to try and burn my own video DVD.

I used Toast 6.0.3 to convert and burn 3 Divx (.avi) files into DVD-Video at Standard Quality, NTSC format (I live in the US), and with a DVD Menu.

Using my Playstation 2 (Not the best dvd player, I know), the video appears sunken, the original files were fansubbed anime, and most of the subtitles are below the bottom of the TV's screen.

I burned two other DVD-Video discs, and came up with the same problem. I was only able to test on a Japanese Playstation 2 on the same TV, and on the Mac that burned the video. The Mac played the DVD just fine, but the other Playstation had the same problem.

Does anyone know if this is a problem with the way I'm burning the files, using my Playstation 2 as a DVD player, or maybe even a problem with my TV? Has anyone else had this problem before?

[kidtexas]

I'll take a guess. Most tv's have a rather large area of the image (a border if you will) that won't fit on the visible part of the screen. To see what I mean, if you have iDVD, there is a command in there to show the tv safe parts of the image (apple-T).

you might not notice this on a home made movie, because when you played that video back on your tv originally from your camera, this part of the image was cut off, just like on the dvd copy. However, a video from the internet or wherever probably has the subtitles down in this "unsafe" part of the image which is subsequently hidden on your tv. Especially if this video was fansubbed on computer - the subbers probably weren't thinking about tv safe areas, etc.

Or maybe not.

[Phranken9]

Thanks for the reply. Follow-up question then, is there a way to scale or edit the video to fit into the "safe-zone" on my tv? Don't have iDVD, have iMovie though

[kidtexas]

hnmm... probably, but I wouldn't exactly know what to tell you. You would need some kind of video editing program that is more powerful than iMovie than can put the video you want scaled down but overlaying a large image (a black background or something). I really don't know what program to tell you to look for or how to use it.

Again, in iDVD, you can only see where the unsafe areas are; you can't automatically correct for it. It just makes aware of where you shouldn't put titles and menus..

maybe someone else can add something to this discussion.

[Uncle Skeleton]

with QuickTime Pro, take a black image that's ~20% bigger in both dimensions than your movie. Open this image in QT, select all, copy, go to the movie and Add Scaled. You will probably have to go into the Movie Properties and adjust the Layer of one or both tracks so the video is on top of the black. Now go to Size (of the Video track, still in Movie Properties) and use the arrow keys to move the movie to the center. Save As (not Self Contained) and send that file to Toast.