ffmepgX settings for AVID NTSC D1 Meridian QT source ?

[csdesigns]

This comes from a post from someone on the cow forums on ffmpegX. I thought there may be a better chance of answering his question here:

Per a suggestion in another post, I D/L ffmpegX and all of it's attendant computer-literate unix source files (I've come to the conclusion that the relative price of software has nothing to do with output quality, it's all in the GUI) and worked with it for many hours last night. It came close to correctly transcoding 720x486 NTSC D1 QT AVID output into MPEG-2 but not quite.

The mpeg2enc codec was able to fill the 640x480 screen of MPEG-2 Component Playback enabled Quicktime player once I turned off "Letterbox" in the options settings of ffmpegX but this codec doesn't support crop, so there was still the noisy top and bottom edges when the file, which destined for a DVD, plays back on a computer screen vs a TV screen. And I might assume then that the codec is scaling the 720x486 to 720x480 instead of cropping, yes?

The ffmpeg codec has support for cropping but I was never able to get it to not "letterbox" the output. I'm assuming here that QuickTime Players MPEG-2 640x480 "output" is just for correct 4:3 aspect ratio presentation, yes? I was also not able to get ffmpeg codec to dig out any audio from the source file, something the mpeg2enc did fine. The AVID auio output (for the moment) is 44.1 - I wonder if the ffmpeg codec can only see 48?

For what it's worth, for the type of encoding I do most (MPEG-2 from AVID output), BitVice leads in the 10th - if I can get the developer to offer a 2/4 crop option instead of 0/6, I'd really be ready to buy.

thanks for any help,
ren hinks

Major, any clues? Is the cropping related to the .mov source file cropping bug with ffmpeg engine I have talked to you about previously?

[major]

Due to a ffmpeg bug in mov demuxing, "Decode with Quicktime" is always enabled with mov files, thus leading to autoletterboxing. I'll add an option in 0.0.9q to disable letterboxing.