Video Frame Size

[66Biker]

Hey Y'all,

Is it possible to make an MKV video with a larger frame size? Every one I have made with MakeMKV copy at 720x480 and I would like to set it to be 1280x720. Some of my DVD's were filmed in HD, and I would like to take advantage of that quality if possible.

Thanks in advance,

66Biker

[Woodstock]

You can resize the video, but you won't gain any quality from it. That ship sailed when the bits were burned into the DVD substrate.

Programs like handbrake can do it, but the graphic user interface on handbrake won't allow upscaling, because the average high-def TV's built-in hardware is USUALLY better at upscaling that software implementations. You can do it with the command line version of handbrake, though.

[66Biker]

Thanks for replying so soon. On some forums I have waited days for a reply.

The quality is actually pretty good sometimes, even though the frame size (I hope that's the correct term) is always 740x480, the image quality in full screen is usually excellent depending on the source quality. I was just wondering why no matter what DVD I copy, the results are always 740x480. But in any case, I don't see anywhere to set Frame Size in MakeMKV, so no matter.

I will say this though. MakeMKV has brought peace to my house. I have a lot of DVDs. I keep a list of them in a movie database program and a few days ago I passed 1,500 titles. Considering a lot of the TV series sets I have multiple disks, anywhere from 2 or 3 up to as many as 40, there are quite a few disks in total. We live in a place that has no broadcast TV to speak of, what little there is we get spotty reception of, and cable is ridiculously expensive here (over $100 a month for basic service with almost nothing worth watching), so we went for Internet TV and DVD/BD based stuff more often than not. But the more DVDs I got, the higher the stacks of boxes got, and she told me I'd have to rent a storage unit for them if my collection continues to get larger.

Then last Christmas a pack of 100 DVD-R disks I ordered was late and I started playing around with MakeMKV and loved it, and she gave me an 8Tb USB drive for Christmas. And now after making MKV files from a couple hundred of my DVDs, I don't buy (or have to store) cases of DVD-R disks anymore. The number of new DVDs in the collection continues to grow at the usual rate.

So I'd like to say a great big Thank You to whoever wrote this program.

[Woodstock]

The size is the size because that's what DVDs are defined as being. An NTSC disk is 720x480, PAL is 720x576. But, the pixels aren't necessarily "square"; anamorphic can be used to make the display resolution wider, which is how the "good" wide-screen disks are done. "Bad" WS is when they use square pixels and only use 360 vertical pixels with letterboxing to fill out the rest of the available resolution.

Keep it up and you'll find yourself buying a multi-drive network attached server, with lots of large drives. My primary NAS is 70TB, and half full, with 35,000 video files.

[66Biker]

Hey Woodstock,

Sorry for not replying sooner, but I'm "not a spring chicken anymore" and my health sucks. With the pandemic, my pain specialist's office has been closed since March and just reopened last week. Now that I've had my long over due nerve blocks, I'm a happy camper.

Thanks for the info on video size. I had a feeling that was the case, but confirmation is a good thing. Not to mention that not all of my DVDs are widescreen, and some are not 740x480 when copied. Some of the old 4:3 disks copies are pretty small. Costco had the 8Tb USB drives for $80 and I bought three, giving me four total, plus two 2Tb and 1 1Tb drives I had before. I was using the 1Tb drive to play movies through my DVD player, but I found out the 2Tb and 8Tb drives were originally formatted with NTFS and exFAT filing system, and my DVD player doesn't recognize exFAT. But a simple reformat fixes that.

I don't know if I over did it or not, because I copied about 300 of my DVDs and that took up about 1.5Tb. So if that amount of required space holds, it would only be less than one of the 8Tb drives. But you know how that goes, I'm sure. You think you have enough hard drive space, but there never really is. Things keep getting bigger and bigger... But I haven't bought any new DVD+R disks in well over a year, and it doesn't look like I will be for a long time.

[Woodstock]

I'm told there is a limit to what is a reasonable amount of available storage. I cannot say that this is true. Having additional drives gives you backup options, should one drive fail. And, believe me, they can... I have a nice 4tb portable drive I bought for my laptop that failed spectacularly a few months ago.

If you ever think you're running low on space, DVD video can compress very well, using more modern encoders. Converting a DVD from the original MPEG2 encoding to h.264, especially if you remove the original interlacing, can shrink a video by 50% or more, with little change in quality.

Bluray video is already compressed using these newer encodings, but the settings aren't as aggressive as they could be.

If that interests you, my personal recommendation is to start with a free encoder, like handbrake (easy to find in any search engine). That way it doesn't cost anything to play.

By the way, your user name reminds me of someone... Does "BBO" mean anything to you?