DVD Workshop amp; letterbox problem like, maintain, captures, original

andy

Has anyone had problems like I've just had trying to get DVD Workshop to maintain the widescreen 16:9/4:3 letterbox aspect ratio of a group of XVid encoded AVIs when authoring to DVD?

I can get NeroVision Express to burn a group of HDTV/letterboxed widescreen TV captures, and the resulting DVD plays the programs in proper letterbox 16:9/4:3 format.  

But for some reason I'm missing (or maybe DVD Workshop just can't do it), DVD Workshop insists on converting the apect ratio of the original letterbox AVIs to a full 4:3 frame, stretching the vertical video display to a full NTSC 480 pixels, and loosing the top and bottom black borders of the letterbox.

Thanks for any input.

TS

Just can't figure this out.  Seems DVD Workshop is having problems translating the XVid/AVI 624x352 frames in my files to a widescreen 16:9 apsect ratio.

Its editor screen is stretching the 352 vertical resolution to a distorted 480.  And I guess leaving the horizontal resolution at 624 with black bars on either end.  Maybe DVD Workshop just isn't as intuitive at resizing files as NeroVision Express.  I notice it also isn't able to automatically transcode amp; recompress files down a bit that are initially bigger than will fit on a standard DVD like NVE does.

I wonder if there's another app that's better at these things than either of these.  I like the way NVE is smart at some tasks where DVDW isn't.  But compared to DVDW, NVE is very limited in it's authoring design tools.

TS

Just thought I'd update this issue for anyone who may have the same problem at some point.  I'm wondering if the non-repsonse on this may have been do to fewer people reading the forums over the holiday.  However after reading through the forums on this, I found that writing XVids to DVDs readable in home DVD players is a bit of a senistive topic in the area of copyright issues, and all of the XVid files on the net containing materials taken from souces that are copyright protected.

I did find the little freeware tool DivXToDVD though which solved the problem I was having burning some of my own XVid files to DVD.  It lets you load a group of DivX or Xvid files, and then processes them to a set of DVD files that then can be burned to a DVD with Nero, or some other DVD-Video burning software.

I also found a few guides online that address the issue.  I'd copy the links here, but I don't have them at my fingertips... and maybe it's better what with the copyright issue, and how some people on the forums feel about this topic.

TS