What is the best way to Un-Letterbox an SVCD?

[LisaB]

I have an SVCD that appears to have been mistakenly Letterboxed twice. The result is that there are huge black bars, and the picture is squashed vertically.

The only way I can figure out how to undo the damage is to crop all the black in VDub (MPEG2 version), frameserve to TMPGEnc, and then reencode to SVCD, making sure to identify the source as 16:9 display, and choose Full Screen (maintain aspect ratio) as video arrange method.

This method method worked successfully for a small clip, but took an awful long time. I think it's taking a long time because of the frameserving.

Is there a way to do this entirely in TMPGEnc? I keep thinking some combination of crop filter, resize filter, source aspect ratio, and video arrange method should do the trick, but I can't figure out what I need to do. (for those who want the specific details, my source is PAL, and the black bars are 128 high)

[gonzalimator]

Try doing a 'clip frame' operation in the advanced tab of TMPGEnc. Trim off the black and leave just the picture. Then you coud do a 'custom resize' on the video 'arrange method'. For SVCD it might be 480x405 for 16:9 without compensating for TV overscan. I've done this before and it worked great for me. Hope it works for you.

PS. I used 720 as the basis for the width of the video and if you use 704 as in a xVCD the custom resize resolution you could also try is 480x396. I'm not sure which one is more correct.