How to Convert the River DVD to 16:9

I already got my River single along with the DVD today and finds the 4:3 aspect ratio very annoying on my PC monitor and TV. Not only 4:3, all of the videos also gave me unnecessary black borders here and there. There’s an option to do pan and scan and so forth on my TV/PC Media Player, but that is just not enough for my viewing pleasure due to unprocessed/Nearest Neighbor scaling.

Thus, I decided to manually rip the DVD and transcode it into 16:9 which then pretty much makes it a more enjoyable viewing pleasure. Here’s how to do it (Click the thumbnail to show larger image)

01. Download XMedia Recode first. A free and powerful video converter program.

02. Copy all the VOB files from your DVD (VTS_01_1.VOB, VTS_02_1.VOB and VTS_03_1.VOB). The DVD is surprisingly unprotected and there’s no different angle and no subtitle so there’s no need for a DVD ripper nor a subtitle ripper application here. Just copy and paste will do the job for you.

03. Install Xmedia Recode and open the VOB file you have just copied from your DVD.

04. You will see various encoding profile there. Choose one that you preferred. My PC Monitor and TV both are Toshiba’s but I chose Sony TV there as the encoding profile I preferred and it is still okay.

05. Skip the Video and Audio configuration unless you know what you are doing here

06. What weird is, it seems like all the videos were shot using 16:9 aspect ratio and then they decided to transcode it to 4:3 when transferring over to the DVD. Well, it does makes our job easier this time.

Heads to the Filter/Preview tab and drag the time bar to choose the brightest scene with smallest top and bottom black bars you could get. Change the video size to 16:9 format, this time I chose 720p. Change aspect ratio to 16:9 and change zoom option to Fit to Screen. In scaling mode, I chose Lanczos since I preferred a crisper and sharper image after scaling the video. The downside with Lanczos is that sometimes it produces more unnecessary ring and artifact compared to the other method such as Bicubic. Choose one you prefer as long as it is not Nearest Neighbor. It is one of the fastest method out there but almost did nothing to the scaled image. So please do expect a very jaggy video if you prefer Nearest Neighbor.

07. And now, we gonna do some tweaking by cropping those top and bottom black borders. Why do we need to do this? It is due to the video aspect ratio itself. We gonna do some padding in the next step, so a cropping is needed now to ensure there’s no aspect ratio error which somehow makes the video stretched like God knows what. Refer to the image below for cropping the videos. The image gonna look distorted here, but leave it be.

08. And now, let’s do some padding for the left and right side of the video. This gonna make the video looking much better and fit the 16:9 aspect ratio very well. Again, refer to the image below :

09. That’s it, you are almost there. Click Add Job in the menu bar.

10. Check the Job tab to see your configuration. Make sure everything is fine there and click Encode.

11. That’s it! You will just have to wait the transcoding process now. It gonna take a while so grab some coffee and do something else while you are at it. On my AMD FX 8320 rig, it took me about 5 minutes for the River Behind The Scene video.

Image comparison using PotPlayer on my PC :

Please ensure that you legally own your DVD and using the method mentioned above only for archiving purpose and private watching.