Widescreen DVD conversion to Xvid always has black bars! Why?

[mistafro]

Hi, I am converting some of my DVD's to xvids and they are all widescreen, why do I get black bars on the top and bottom of all my files? Can't I make it so I have just full image?

What is the best way to do this with the highest of quality?

Thanks!

[Case]

Cinemascope (2.35:1) is wider than widescreen tvs (1.78:1), so many movies on DVD will have black bars as part of the video (!) on DVD, as DVD is either 16:9 (1.78:1) or 4:3 (1.33:1).

To remove the black bars when converting to XviD, you'd need to crop the black parts. The Autocrop button in Filters may be helpful as you won't have to calculate the number of pixels anymore. The timecode in the Preview section (next to Crop) will be used for the sample frame.

[mistafro]

I tried Autocrop on Lord of The Rings and ended up with a really tiny size xvid, definetly not of good quality, so there is no way to crop and still have great quality?

[patlabombe]

Do the autocrop trick. Set the video size to 720x304 and click on best to adjust the bitrate. Best result with Xvid mencoder.