Setting Video Size for Transcoding of Problematic DVD Source

[VlcNovice]

Hi all,

after hours of trying different --sout-transcode-* options and reading the forums I'm hoping to get some assistance here.

My aim is to force the VLC 0.8.6d transcoding process to provide a specific video size as a result, possibly padding it at top and bottom to achieve a 4:3 aspect ratio while the source video is 16:9. In this case the full source video must be visible.

Having said that I should maybe add that I'm testing this also with a DVD title which VLC plays correctly as 16:9 while it transcodes it as 4:3 so I presume that I somehow need to be able to force the transcoding process to see this DVD title as 16:9 (unless VLC assumes this correctly on its own which is not the case for 0.8.6d).

The only way I managed to do this was by using the scale and paddtop and paddbottom parameters. However, the scale is given in percent and the padding in lines so this yields undesirable results if the source video does not have the assumed width.

All other combinations of width, height, canvas-width, canvas-height, canvas-aspect lead to either a square (!) result, no padding, not enough padding, or the right height but not the required width...

Can someone point out how those parameters are supposed to influence the result? Some folks indicated one should use width and canvas-height and canvas-aspect but it doesn't work for me in this case.

Thank you!