can I make a svcd for both 4:3 and 16:9 TV's?

Hi- It means that you'll have to use the zoom setting on your TV's remote control to scale it so it fills the screen left to right with correct AR. If you intend to have them play only on your widescreen, you might experiment encoding to 16:9. You might need to use an extra CD to get the same quality, though. If you want them to play on both 16:9 and 4:3 TV sets, then continue to encode as 4:3.

Hi- I may have misunderstood you, Nick, but when I encode a 16:9 DVD to 16:9 SVCD, my DVD player and widescreen TV play them fine at proper AR. You just have to make sure the DVD player is outputting for a 16:9 TV set. Maybe other DVD players are different, I don't know. I expect that 4:3 no borders, Encode as 4:3 will work fine also for widescreen TVs, but I've never tried it. I don't know if it makes a difference, but I'm in NTSC land. I just read Q57 of the FAQ. When I play the 16:9 SVCDs on my 4:3 TV with a different DVD player, they play fine, but without the black bars added. So people look skinny and tall. But I'll go fool with it some more and see if I can make it work, as your comments say it should.

You're just lucky! An SVCD encoded with the anamorphic flag will simply not play on many players. Failure to add the black bars on your 4:3 TV is a minor symptom! Many DVD players suffer violent picture shaking, monochrome output and so on rendering the SVCD useless. Encoding 16:9 material as 4:3 no borders has exactly the same effect for everyone as anamorphic has for you, ie a 16:9 picture fills the 480:480/576 matrix without borders => eggheads on 4:3 TV but looks normal on a widescreen. Letterbox 16:9, ie add borders and encode as 4:3, will play normally on a 4:3 but will need zoom on a widescreen. They are, however, the only format by which correct playback can be assured on any TV. Avoid anamorphic 16:9 SVCD encodes like the plague!

All (afaik) widescreen TV's have this zoom function (albeit under a variety of names). Basically a 4:3 letterbox picture can be stretched to fit the 16:9 screen removing the black bars top and bottom. The aspect ratio will be absolutely correct so it will not look strange. So if you want SVCD's which play perfectly on any compatible dvd player, on either a 4:3 or 16:9 tv, always encode using "16:9 (borders added encode as 4:3)"