letterbox to widescreen

[derfdorf]

hi,

I have a few DVD movies that are letterboxed, and viewing them on my widescreen TV is annoying. the zoom on my TV isn't great and its noticably bad - so id like to remove the black bars from my dvds. so far I cant find any programs that can crop without losing too much quality. can anyone make any recommendations?

[guns1inger]

You can't simply crop them. You would then have to stretch them vertically as well, then re-encode them. I would suggest tmpgenc, as it should be able to do all of this for you.

Whether you will get better quality than your zoom is debatable though.

[sacajaweeda]

You could use AviSynth & VDubMod to crop, resize & preview it until you get some results you can live with.

MPEGSource("whatever.mpg")
Crop(0,xx,0,-xx)
LanczosResize(720,480)

etc, etc

Then once you get something that looks OK to you, just encode it and re-author it & burn it. Your apect ratio will be completly out to lunch at this point, but I don't belive you really care about that.

Or not.

[midnightsun]

just make sure these are not 5:3 (i.e. 1.67) DAR movies, in which case you can't crop the same way as you would any >=1.78 DAR source.

You didn't specify if you are in ntsc or pal land, but this is what you need to do:

Rip to hard disk using dvddecrypter for example in ifo mode and choose the main movie (you don't even need the audio as that will not be touched)

Create a DGMPGDec project (you'll find it in the tools section, and look for guides on how to do that, there's plenty of them around(see the doom9.org guide for example); this is the successor to dvd2avi so you might have to look that up just in case)

make an avisynth script (with notepad for example); if you don't have avisynth download and install the latest version, which should be 2.56 or something; be sure it's 2.5x though!

#PAL
mpegsource("source.d2v")
crop(0,72,0,-72)
lanczosresize(720,576)
converttorgb24() #if you intend to use tmpegenc or
converttoyuy2() #if you intend to use cce

save as whatevernameyoulike.avs (careful! notepad will add a .txt extension if you don't change it manually)

or if you use ntsc:

#NTSC
mpegsource("source.d2v")
crop(0,60,0,-60)
lanczosresize(720,480)
converttorgb24() #if you intend to use tmpegenc or
converttoyuy2() #if you intend to use cce

save file the same way as above.

Then open the .avs you have just saved with either cce or tmpegenc and have them re-encode the movie. Just make sure to choose 16:9 as display aspect ratio in the encoder settings.

If everything goes according to plan you should be fine.

Re-reading my post, you should also identify whether this is ntsc film+pulldown or "pure" ntsc if it's ntsc you're dealing with. The process becomes more involved in that case. (ah the joys of pal!)
Some of the ntsc guys should be able to help you out with that kind of source.

Another thing to look into is whether the source is progressive or interlaced, since you would want to encode the same way as the source. Tmpegenc *should* be accurate in telling you that piece of info but double checking won't do you any harm. Look around the forums for how to tell progressive and interlacered sources apart.

corrections welcome if need be.