How can I crop a dvd?

[Castor troy]

Hi people,

Need some help with the following.

I have a dvd and I would like to crop the picture as it has an annoying watermak just above the bottom black bar. What would you suggest? please bear in mind I am a complete newbie to this so explaining this to me how its done in the lamest of terms would be greatly appreciated. What software would I need and how to do it.

Thanks.

[theDruid]

Do you really want to get into this?!!? :P

So you have a DVD (as in a video on a disc in MPEG-2 format)..

and you'd like to crop the picture at the bottom to get rid of a watermark..

and then put it back on a new DVD-R?

Is that right?

First off, you'll need to rip your DVD to a file on your PC.

Then you'll need to edit the file.

It's very hard to edit MPEG, so you'll probably need to convert it to a different format for editing, and then back to MPEG-2 to put back onto DVD.

One way of doing this would be to use a program that can decode the MPEG-2, edit it, and then frameserve it back into an encoder.

VirtualDubMod could do this for you - it can decode MPEG-2 files, and you can use filters to remove the watermark, or crop the whole area off.

Remember at some stage to resize the video back to a DVD-compliant resolution.

You'll need an MPEG-2 encoder that can accept frameserving from VirtualDub - many have problems with this.

Once you've got your video back to a DVD-compliant MPEG-2, you need to author and burn your DVD back onto a disc.

MPEG-2 encoders tend not to be free, and this is presuming you have a DVD-burner.

There are many other ways to skin this particular cat - but what I've described above ought to work.

Now - I've described the processes you'll have to go through...

(namely rip->decode->edit->encode->author->burn)

so you've plenty of reading to do (look at the guides, and do forum searches) if you really want to proceed with this.

cheers,
mcdruid.