Need to remove black lines top/bottom

Verlager · Member Joined: 05 Feb 2008 Location: Rochester NY

I have a Time Warner Cable TV account and a Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD (160 GB HD) and I record some HD shows, then pipe them out to my Plextor ConvertX PX-M402U. I then boot into Xpro, run SageTV 6.3 and capture the file, and edit with womble MM editor. The problem is that I get gray bands across the top and bottom of the output files. Check out this screenshot: screenshot1.png Can't fix this in Womble. So I boot to Linux Mint and AviDemux, load the file, apply a crop filter, removing 64 from top and bottom and the preview looks good.

But when I save the file, the bands are still there.

Does anybody have some choice words of wisdom or suggestions regarding my convoluted and tedious, unsuccessful method(s)? Frankly, my friends, I'm getting tired of hard, and want to start working smart. At first I noticed that working hard was character building. But it soon become a repetitious exercise in futility. Any comments are welcome.

And why isn't AviDemux filter being applied on save? Anything else I could try? I can use CLI.
_________________
..and from the god's we've stolen pi, two times again our radii. the glyphs of mice and men we read, the darkness in our souls stampede....
Linux bc calculator can display pi to enormous precision: bc -l; scale = 500; 4*a(1)

disturbed1 · Member Joined: 22 Apr 2001 Location: init 4

I don't think I fully under stand the problem you're having.

What I gather from your post, is -
8300HD is outputing 16:9 content, you are capturing this content with the Plextor in 4:3 format. And don't like the fact that when you capture 16:9 content with a 4:3 device, it puts black bars on the top and bottom?

Now, what is you final goal? DVD? XviD, x264?

If you are wanting to output back to DVD, but have it actually in 16:9 format, crop the top and bottom of the black bars, resize to 720x480, encode as 16:9.

ffmpeg -i file.mpg -croptop 64 -cropbottom 64 -s 720x480 -aspect 16:9 -target dvd-ntsc output.mpg

Want something a little more complicated?

mkfifo video.yuv
mplayer -noconsolecontrols -benchmark -nosound -noframedrop -noautosub -vo yuv4mpeg:file=video.yuv capture.mpg \
-vf crop=:352::,scale=720:-2:0:0:0.00:0.75:ntsc:0:0,fspp=5::6::,unsharp=l3x3:1.20:c3x3:0.50,expand=720:480 & \
cat video.yuv | yuvdeinterlace -S 0 | yuvdenoise* -G 2,3,3 | mpeg2enc -f 8 -a 3 -g 3 -G 18 -4 1 -2 1 --cbr -b 5500 -R 2 -K tmpgenc \
-o output.m2v

* yuvdenoise changed it params in the newer release candidates, older than 1.9 would use yuvdenoise -s 2,3,3 -g 32,128,128 -t 3,4,4, and you may need to adjust the crop value. 352 would chop 64 from the top and bottom (480-64-64=352). You could also remove yuvdeinterlace, and keep the footage interlaced, or add yadif to the mplayer filter chain. You can add remove any filter needed, either y4m/yuv filters or mplayer filters.

When that file is played back on a 4:3 monitor or tv, it will append the black bars. Remember watching 16:9 DVDs on a sqaure TV? When the file is played back on a wide screen TV/Monitor, there will be no black bars.

You're best bet might be to encode to XviD or x264. Check these programs that do a bang up job - http://xvidenc.sourceforge.net/
_________________
Linux _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly.

jagabo · Member Joined: 09 Dec 2005 Location: none

SA cable boxes convert 16:9 HD to letterboxed 4:3 SD at the s-video and composite outputs. Your computer is just capturing what the box is putting out.

Verlager · Member Joined: 05 Feb 2008 Location: Rochester NY

disturbed1 · Member Joined: 22 Apr 2001 Location: init 4

Grab h264enc. It will make your life easy

http://h264enc.sourceforge.net/

Grab the latest tarball, extract it to a directory, and run it (from the cli) from there. No need to install.

./h264enc --help
Will give you lots of information.

./h264enc -sc
Performs a check to see what programs you have installed

I usually just use
./h264enc -1p -p uhq
Which will do a one pass encode with ultra high quality.

You can also try
./h264enc -1p -p hq
Which give you a simple one pass encode at high quality
_________________
Linux _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly.

Verlager · Member Joined: 05 Feb 2008 Location: Rochester NY

LOL! I'm still in a pickle!

I had a letterboxed file.mpg sized 2.5 GB. I can remove the letterbox bands and resize it with ffmpeg -i file.mpg -croptop 64 -cropbottom 64 -s 720x480 -aspect 16:9 -target dvd-ntsc output.mpg , but the filesize grows to 17.7 GB. That's too big. Or I can run h264enc -1p -p hq which squeezes the down to a nice 700 MB size, but retains the letterboxing bands.

I want to do both compressing and cropping in one pass, preferably w/o pipling, because piping is incompatible with h264enc.

There seems to be an option that would enable cropping in the h264enc script:

disturbed1 · Member Joined: 22 Apr 2001 Location: init 4

Specify the crop values [default is 704:464:6:8]:720:352::

Yes there are 2 : after 352. So that's ::

Verlager · Member Joined: 05 Feb 2008 Location: Rochester NY

Tried your suggested resize to 720:352:: and the preview from the h264enc script looked fine; the black lines were removed. However the resultant file was unplayable and only 4.0k in size.
_________________
..and from the god's we've stolen pi, two times again our radii. the glyphs of mice and men we read, the darkness in our souls stampede....
Linux bc calculator can display pi to enormous precision: bc -l; scale = 500; 4*a(1)

disturbed1 · Member Joined: 22 Apr 2001 Location: init 4

I never suggested a resize, it was a crop

There's a difference between crop and resize, as there is between .mpg and .mp4, .avi, .mkv (which is the container x264 files need to go in).

The preview worked, and looked correct, so the crop settings where passed correctly. Sounds like a bad option somewhere was passed. Giving a 4k file means mencoder didn't even encode the file, it instantly bailed. h264enc has the option to both inspect the command and save the command.

./h264enc --help
man mplayer

There isn't honestly anything I won't tell you that isn't in those 2 pieces of documentation

I'd spend the 5 minutes and see what they have to say

_________________
Linux _is_ user-friendly. It is not ignorant-friendly and idiot-friendly.

Verlager · Member Joined: 05 Feb 2008 Location: Rochester NY

I looked at the mencoder script generated by h264enc and it appears impossible for a person of my modest abilities to parse. I guess I know when I'm licked.

mencoder "/home/rmack/temp/test-5.mpg" -o "/home/rmack/temp/test-5.avi" -vf crop=720:352::,softskip,harddup -oac faac -faacopts mpeg=4:br=110:object=2 -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=1000:me=umh:me_range=16:nodct_decimate:nointerlaced:8x8dct:threads=auto:nofast_pskip:trellis=1:partitions=p8x8,b8x8,i8x8,i4x4:mixed_refs:keyint=300:keyint_min=30:frameref=3:bframes=14:bime:b_adapt:b_pyramid:weight_b:direct_pred=auto:subq=5:nobrdo:chroma_me:cabac:deblock:nossim:nopsnr

This, of course, crashes mencoder instantly without processing the file as desired.
_________________
..and from the god's we've stolen pi, two times again our radii. the glyphs of mice and men we read, the darkness in our souls stampede....
Linux bc calculator can display pi to enormous precision: bc -l; scale = 500; 4*a(1)

disturbed1 · Member Joined: 22 Apr 2001 Location: init 4

Verlager · Member Joined: 05 Feb 2008 Location: Rochester NY

Thank you for your input. It is appreciated. The first suggestion bombed:

disturbed1 · Member Joined: 22 Apr 2001 Location: init 4

Verlager · Member Joined: 05 Feb 2008 Location: Rochester NY

This takes too many steps to save and compress a file. Can anyone comment on this cumbersome method?

I. I record the HD cable TV signal to the SA cable box, which converts 16:9 HD to letterboxed 4:3 SD at the s-video and composite outputs.

II. I pipe the two-hour, 4 GB file to my computer with this shell script:

jagabo · Member Joined: 09 Dec 2005 Location: none

You can use AviDemux to do steps 3 and 4 at the same time. It can output h.264+AAC in an MP4 container. You just have to use settings suitable for your player.

Verlager · Member Joined: 05 Feb 2008 Location: Rochester NY

Not exactly... If you select x264 from Avidemux, the filters are disabled. Tell me if I'm mistaken.
_________________
..and from the god's we've stolen pi, two times again our radii. the glyphs of mice and men we read, the darkness in our souls stampede....
Linux bc calculator can display pi to enormous precision: bc -l; scale = 500; 4*a(1)

jagabo · Member Joined: 09 Dec 2005 Location: none

Verlager · Member Joined: 05 Feb 2008 Location: Rochester NY

Huh. And the Linux Avidemux doesn't support the .mkv container. That could have helped.
_________________
..and from the god's we've stolen pi, two times again our radii. the glyphs of mice and men we read, the darkness in our souls stampede....
Linux bc calculator can display pi to enormous precision: bc -l; scale = 500; 4*a(1)

Verlager · Member Joined: 05 Feb 2008 Location: Rochester NY

I off-loaded the task to the bedroom office Q6600 Linux Mint machine and it worked. Thank you so much for the tip!

I hope I can get crisper with avidemux.
_________________
..and from the god's we've stolen pi, two times again our radii. the glyphs of mice and men we read, the darkness in our souls stampede....
Linux bc calculator can display pi to enormous precision: bc -l; scale = 500; 4*a(1)

jagabo · Member Joined: 09 Dec 2005 Location: none

So is it just a version number difference?

n12345 · Member Joined: 28 May 2008 Location: New Zealand

Im trying to extract part of this flv video and im using WinFF, does anyone know if it is possible to just grab a section of the video and encode just that part?