picture off center

[tammikm]

I extracted and burned a show from tivo on to a dvd-r, when i play it in my dvd player i have to switch to pcm to get sound and the picture is dtreched and off center any idea how to fix the sound so its digital and picture so its the full screen and not stretched looking?

thanks

[cojonesdetoro]

I extracted and burned a show from tivo on to a dvd-r, when i play it in my dvd player i have to switch to pcm to get sound and the picture is dtreched and off center any idea how to fix the sound so its digital and picture so its the full screen and not stretched looking?
thanks

The tivo does not record at DVD resolutions. Some DVD players will adjust and others will not. The only options you are have to get another player or hack your Tivo to record at DVD resolutions. I hacked my Tivo to record at DVD and like it better. The basic quality level is actually watchable now and doesn't take much more space. I also record everything, even movies, at medium now because I rarely see any artifacts on it. The tivoweb resource editor let's you change the resolution. There's a post here somewhere showing how to make the Tivo record in DVD compatible resolutions.

[malfunct]

I extracted and burned a show from tivo on to a dvd-r, when i play it in my dvd player i have to switch to pcm to get sound and the picture is dtreched and off center any idea how to fix the sound so its digital and picture so its the full screen and not stretched looking?

thanks

the sound is mpeg I layer II when you take it off the tivo, unfortunately most stereo recievers can't decode that bitstream so you have to tell your dvd player to do it. If you are using the digital out the stream is still digital, its just decoded before its sent instead of after. As far as I know there is next to no sound quality loss doing this unless your dvd player sucks. The way to "fix" it is to transcode the mpeg I layer II audio to AC3 or PCM but I doubt most software you get on the pc to do that work is better than your dvd player so I say just deal with turning PCM output on.

As far as the picture goes its more difficult. By default tivos don't record at "standard" resolutions (dtivo for instance does 480x480) so you have two choices, transcode all the video, or get a dvd player that plays the video correctly. For me the answer was to spend another $80 and get a dvd player that handled the non-standard video correctly. If you have a stand alone tivo you can change the recording resolution so that its one of the standard resolutions, I think the one to go with is 352x480 or something close to that. Its called half D1 and nearly all dvd players can play it with the proper aspect ratio.