DVDs aren't centered?

[supafly99]

I ripped a bunch of episodes of the simpsons using dvd shrink then handbrake, but when i tried to play them, they didn't appear to be centered, they were not cropped right.

So, i stuck in the actualy dvd, and these also were not centered, there was a black bar on the left hand side that was always present.

I tried to crop it using handbrake, but i found that the black sides changed width depending on which chapter was playing.

Is there something wrong with my dvd drive? or is it somthing else?

 

[RumMunkey]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/528.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/528.16)

My guess is that you're seeing the edges that are normally cut off when a 4x3 show is broadcast.

If you look for it, you will notice LOTS of stuff that you didn't see when these shows aired.

Sometimes you'll find boom mics and lights in the shot, or sometimes weird framing issues such as this (sometimes you might get lucky and find a flashing square appear 7 or 9 seconds before a commercial break).

It's called "Overscan" and before 16x9 TVs were commonplace, you just didn't see this kind of stuff because that area would normally be cut off on your screen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan