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I have just made my fisrt DVD recording and I have a question: My new DVD recorder is Pioneer DVR-645 H-S. I have copied footage, with 16:9 aspect ratio, from my digital DV camcorder, onto the Hard Disk of my Pioneer and then copied it on a DVD+R disc. When I played the finalized DVD I noted that the image size on my 32" LG wide screen TV was much smaller than full screen. The setting on the TV was set on "original" and I could view full screen 16:9 broadcasts as well as the image from my DV camcorder and the HD. Only the image from the DVD disc was smaller. I had to set the TV on "zoom" for it to fill the screen. What can have gone wrong?

The copied file has a wrong A/R or similar wrong settings.

Hi VasilisC, welcome to CDFreaks!

It's normal for standalone DVD and HDD/DVD recorders to NOT set 16:9 widescreen flags when recording to DVD+R/RW media.

You could try using DVD-R/RW media instead, which will allow recording with 16:9 widescreen flag if the recorder thinks the program is in 16:9 format.

The recorder will usually decide during recording whether a program is in 16:9 format, either from a 16:9 widescreen flag broadcast over the air, or by the user setting the appropriate flag for that recording.

I don't have a Pioneer recorder so I can't be more specific than that.

None of this applies when using a computer to burn your DVDs BTW.

Actually, most set top DVD recorders dont look at the widescreen flag when recording onto any media (there are a few that do though but the number can be counted on one hand). There are ways around this though but it involves some work by yourself.

Record as normal onto a DVDRW disc (either + or -).
Copy the files from the DVDRW onto the HDD of your PC (I usually use DVD shrink with no recomprssion to change the format from DVD-+VR to true DVD format)
Use IFOEDIT to change the aspect ratio bit in the IFO files to match the source media (usually changing from 4:3 to 16:9 options)
Burn the files back to a DVD disc.

This will sort out the aspt ratio as its simply a flag in the IFO file that decides on what the recording is.

If I understand well, you ended up with a 4:3 frame containing a 1.77:1 picture with mattes (black bars), that you have to zoom on your TV, instead of a compressed/anamorphic 16:9 frame tht just fills the screen when you select "16:9" on the TV?

If so, this problem has nothing to do with the DVD itself.

Assuming you have actually genuine anamorphic 16:9 (= anamorphic) with your camcorder, what you need to do is send a raw compressed/anamorphic image to your Pioneer (which will fill all of the 4:3 frame and look streched vertically, instead of a reframed image. Take a look at the manual of your camcorder to see if they mention this feature.

First make sure that the camcorder does this, then if the problem persists, you need to investigate the input options of you Pioneer. Maybe it decides to shrink to matted 4:3 any incoming video that it recognizes as 16:9 (though I'd be surprised that it does that). Just to be on the safe side, check that in the setup of your Pioneer, the TV output is set to "16:9 auto".

As the others have explained, though, the resulting DVD won't automatically trigger the 16:9 flag that tells the TV to switch to 16:9 mode, but you should at least have a full 16:9 frame, you'll just manually set the TV to 16:9 mode.

Now thing is, maybe you have just a matted 4:3 frame all the way from all three sources, and simply your TV detects that it has to zoom on it when it's from HD and camcorder, and not from the DVD. Then just investigate the explanations from the other posters.