BDRebuilder Cropping Problem

[GreyDeath]

I recently got into ripping Blu-Rays to the HDD and making some condensed files. I haven't worked much with MKV but I'm trying BDRebuilder. It's fine for a few movies I've tried so far, I like that it keeps the chapter index, and the ability to keep subtitles in, handy for those movies with bits of Alien language in them. One of them is Star Trek: TMP, but when I try to make an MKV file with the black bars cropped off, BDRB crops off a good portion of the right side as well. Has anyone else come across this problem? Does anyone have a fix besides just having the black bars included (which does work)?

[gonca]

What do you use to frame serve, directshow or dgdecnv

[wulf109]

If you want an MKV,try Vidcoder instead of BDrebuilder.

[fritzi93]

Or try Ripbot. But I think you'll find that you'll occasionally come across movies that trip up the autocrop function of any program (Ripbot included, as I've found).

At least with Ripbot you can preview how it will look and adjust the cropping manually if anything is off. So that's my answer: the "fix" is that you gotta double-check and adjust manually if necessary.

Personally, I stopped bothering with cropping and re-did everything without cropping. (Fortunately I hadn't done my whole collection of BDs.) The extra bits required for the black bars are relatively trivial, IMO.

[GreyDeath]

Uh, think I'm using FFDShow. With the black bars BDRB added 2GB to the final file. I suppose that's not that bad (just bought a 4TB External HDD) Also, weirdly, it shrunk Star Trek TMP down to 6.77 (cropped) while other more recent movies are hovering around 12-14GB. Must be some serious noise reduction going on... :/

I suppose leaving the bars in is okay for the HTPC, just looks kind of weird when not full screen.

[gonca]

With DGDecNV you can manually adjust the cropping if need be. Don't know if it can be done with FFDShow, look in your workfiles folder. Size variations happen when using CRF for encoding. As fritzi93 said, sometimes autocrop gets fooled.

[fritzi93]

I've never seen black bars add 2 GB over a 2.35:1 cropped file. Not anywhere close to that. I think that's a one-off.

If your computer details are right, you'll probably have to stick with BDRB. It's a good deal faster than RipBot (except for Ultrafast setting), but output files will be significantly bigger. Although I did see the odd exception or two when comparing BDRB and RipBot for encoding MKVs. Yeah you never can predict with crf encoding. It'll catch you out.

[GreyDeath]

@gonca, I'll look into DGDecNV, or just be lazy and keep the bars. I just did Star Trek II: TWoK, same thing happened, cropped on the right. Did John Carter before that, no problems. On a side note, can't they find a better print for ST:TWOK, grainy and soft as all get out. ST:TMP looked so much better.

@Fritzi93, hehe, those specs are so old they got whiskers on 'em. Current build for my HTPC is an i3 with Intel Graphics, and 8GB of ram. Encoding takes around 45min-1hour. Question about CRF encoding, I think it was you that suggested a setting of 20, but the default was 23. What is that number even in relation to?

[gonca]

With DGDecNV

Deselect autocrop
When BD_RB finishes extracting and starts encoding abort it
Open the DGI file in WORKING
Enter the cropping values
Restart

[fritzi93]

With CRF values, the lower you go, the better the quality. When you use ~ crf 16, supposedly that's essentially "transparent" compared to the source. I use crf 20; some very knowledgeable members here use crf 18. CRF 20 is "good enough" on a 70" edge-lit LED/LCD at 8' viewing distance. For me, anyway. Higher numbers would be adequate for many people on smaller TVs. My version of RipBot has a default cfr setting of 22.

The higher the quality, the bigger the file. The speed preset also affects file size; slower (usually!) results in smaller. With RipBot (and IIRC, Handbrake et. al.) you can also change the "Tune" settings: animation, film, grain, etc.

[GreyDeath]

Well here's an update. I wasn't able to get DGDecNV or the equivalent for me to work with BDRB. Thanks for the advice, but I guess I'll just convert them with the black bars. I did notice that cropping the black bars also threw off the positioning of subtitles to the point where they were right at the bottom of the frame. So I guess I'll leave well enough alone for wider letterboxed films. Now I'm trying to crop out the pillar boxes on some Star Trek episodes and that's not going so well with the first try. BDBR gives an option to crop to 1440x1080 in Settings, but for Alternative Movie mode it's all 1920x1080. I tried it with AutoCropping Off and just made it the same with pillarbox, now converting with AutoCropping On. Should be this much work. ;P