How do you crop off the edges of an mpeg file?

[True Colors]

dell optiplex 280
Pentium 4 single core processor - 2.8 ghz
Windows XP
using Tivo to Go software to create .tivo files and then running those through video redo to convert them to mpeg files

That is the situation. Now here is my problem......

For whatever reason, the mpeg files have a black border on the right edge of the frame. It is approximately 10 pixels in size. I have no idea why it is there. I would like to trim that off. There is also a line running along the top edge of the frames I would like to trim off which is approximately 5 pixes in size.

Any ideas about software editing programs that can do this for me? Preferably something free and easy to use?

If necessary I could send you an example mpeg file to look at or possibly I could take a screen shot and post it here.

Thanks,

TC

[Baldrick]

I would probably use avidemux or xvid4psp to crop and convert to mpeg or whatever format you like.

[jagabo]

It's very common for video files to have junk at the edges of the frame. Televisions normally overscan so you don't see that junk. Why bother removing it? Re-encoding an MPG file can only reduce the quality.

[txporter]

If you want to get back to tivo-compatible video, then Baldrick's suggestion of XVID4PSP (I haven't used avidemux) is spot on. I have used it for hardcoding subs into mpeg2 files before. It's really pretty easy to use. I have had more luck using the MPEG PS preset than the MPEG NTSC preset. You will get NTSC film rate material from it rather than pulled up material at 29.97 fps. That is fine for TivoHD/Series 3/XL. Not sure which model you are using. I think Series2 might require 29.97 fps, but not positive. At any rate, XVID4PSP utilitizes Avisynth to frameserve video into whatever encoder you use with it. I have sort of self-taught myself a little bit about avisynth scripting from looking through the generated avisynth scripts from XVID4PSP. For MPEG2 encoding, XVID4PSP uses ffmpeg which I was not that happy with. I now build my own scripts and feed them into HCenc.

In the end, if you can pick up how to use avisynth and HCenc, I think you will be able to pretty easily do what you want.

Here is how I would do it with avisynth and HCenc:
1. Demux mpg file with DGIndex using this bat file (generates d2v index file and extracts audio from all .mpg files in directory):

FOR /F "usebackq" %%A IN (`dir /b /on *.mpg`) DO "Path\To\dgindex" -IF=[%%A] -FO=0 -AT=[Path\To\template\ivtc.avs] -OF=[%%~nA] -HIDE -EXIT

ivtc.avs template:

loadplugin("Path\To\DGDecode.dll")
loadplugin("Path\To\TIVTC.dll")
loadplugin("Path\To\VSFilter.dll")

# __vid__ will insert the .d2v file generated by DGIndex into the MPEG2Source call
MPEG2Source("__vid__")

# TFM().TDecimate() will convert NSTC material back to progressive film framerate
TFM().TDecimate()

# Crop(left,top,-right,-bottom) - these are the numbers you quoted
Crop(0,5,-10,0)

# Lanczos4Resize back to original dimensions or whatever you want. I use 720, 400 for DVD rips
Lanczos4Resize(640, 480)

# if you ripped your closed captions, you can use this to burn them into your video
TextSub("__vid__.srt")

2. Edit .ac3 files (or whatever format audio is in) to match MPEG filenames (DGIndex tacks on additional info in the name)
3. Run this batch file to encode files to MPEG2 with HCenc and then mux back into a .mpg

FOR /F "usebackq" %%A IN (`dir /b /on *.avs`) DO "Path\To\hcenc.exe" -i %%A -o %%~nA.m2v -b 4000 -maxbitrate 8000 -aq 2 -smp -2pass -noini -profile best -progressive
mkdir Originals
move *.mpg .\Originals\
move *.srt .\Originals\
FOR /F "usebackq" %%A IN (`dir /b /on *.m2v`) DO "Path\To\mplex.exe" -f 3 -o "%%~nA.mpg" "%%~nA.m2v" "%%~nA.ac3"

4. Run this batch file to clean up files generated for the encoding process.

del *.m2v
del *.ac3
del *.d2v
del *.avs

I use this mainly for NSTC DVD rips, but you can use for SD tivo shows as well. The avisynth script would need to be modified for HD shows.