some format weirdness

ok i have done some searching and it havent been able to find anyone with the same type of problem i seem to have... i have a reply dvr ... i record a movie on digatial cable that is letterboxed ... the recorder recorded it as 4:3 like the broadcast was done ... now i move the mpeg off the recorder onto my system .. because the movie is 5G i need to re-encode it , ... now i used the default dvd template ( ntsc ) in tmpgenc and inported the movie into maestro .. told maestro the movie was 16:9 ... it looks great when played on the computer .. BUT when played on the TV i get a letterboxed movie with a letterboxed movie inside that ( my black levels wer off so i could see the second set of bars inside the bars ) .. now i know i screwed up somthing somewhere but i'm not 100% shore where... should i use the clip fram in tmpgenc to clip down to the acctual movie? if so what do i tell it the source and dest ratio should be? source 4:3 and dest 4:3 or 16:9? and do i use 16:9 or 4:3 in maestro? if my dvdplayer would read dvd-rw's this would not be a post here as i would try differnt methods to get it working .. as is my only other option is to create 6 or 7 clips all encoded differntly and burn them onto ( an expencive ) dvd-r... i may end up doing this , ut i was hopeing someone here would have some advice first.

im not sure but if u got it from tv its 4:3 i think letterboxed just means they added the black bars alot of dvd's are that way too

Your misstake was in authoring as 16:9. You should do it 4:3. That way the viewable area (the area inside the captured black bars) will have AR 16:9. I'm uncertain if it matters a great deal to set the AR to 4:3 in TmpgEnc, though. Or if it's overridden by DVDMaestro anyways. You say "default settings" ... I don't know what they are. Cheers