It seems almost every household these days has a widescreen TV. The next TV you buy will almost certainly be in the widescreen 16:9 format and this is how most DVDs are encoded. But most camcorders come in the more traditional 4:3 flavour. Newer camcorders tend to have "true" widescreen with the suitable widescreen pixel aspect ratio, but most camcorders have at best a flavour of widescreen that merely involves adding black bars to the top and bottom of the screen. So how do we convert a 4:3 video into widescreen. And convert it in a way such that your DVD player automatically picks the correct aspect ratio. It's easy with that little software wonder - TMPGenc.

Chances are you're going to want the video to play back on a TV and therefore the video's to be played in a standalone DVD player. To that end, creating a DVD is the logical step, and using TMPGenc to change the aspect ratio to widescreen is the next logical step - it's one of the better MPEG encoders and will create excellent quality MPEG2 DVD compliant streams.

So first fire up TMPGenc. And start the project wizard. Choose the setting (either PAL or NTSC) that matches your source as circled.

For the best sound quality stick with PCM audio - this is also a requisite to meet NTSC DVD specifications. Click next and browse to your video file on the next screen.

Again, select the 16:9 setting as above. In the above example, I've used a PAL source video. Click next and check clip frame on the next screen.

We now need to clip the top and bottom of our video so that the black bars at the top and bottom dissapear. If you're not using a source video with black bars, use the settings below as a guide:

Next click Arrange setting. From the drop down box. Make sure the setting is on "Full screen". Click OK. You'll probably want to de-interlace your video, so click other settings, then double click on de-interlace. Choose double from the drop down box. Click OK and OK again, then next twice. Click Ok to start encoding!

When played back in media player, it will probably play a squished up image. However, when played in a software or standalone DVD player, the image will automatically be stretched to full screen.