well the dvd player setting mostly fixed the problem. the movie displays right and the menus no longer have black bars however they are still overscanning a little bit im missing about 3/4" off all sides. i cant imagine why it does this now. i started with a 1280x720 image in photoshop added my graphics and exported as 1280x720.png. i then used the image in aftereffects on a 1280x720 template. i added my videos there and exported as 1280x720 lossless .avi i added it as is to dvda and let dvda recompress it. but its not just the main menu overscanning either its all of them. all are 1280x720 images. will resizing the images help? perhaps the images need to be 720x480 so that dvda stretches them to fill the 16:9 template. thanks again adywan. thats a nice trick on the text highlight you mentioned. but is that not the same as choosing "text highlight" in the highlight style menu? or do you just mean it looks better then the text highlight in dvda? i chose text highlight for the main movie button because the underline would not fit under it. and underline for the other 2 menu buttons. personally i do not like the way the built in text highlight looks in dvda so an alternative is welcome. but at this point the overscan problem is paramount. since i wont release it with a glitch like this. if i cant solve it in dvda i would rather author it in another app.