How to remove letterbox bars from a fullscreen DVD?

[mjvgiese]

I just have a fairly simple (I hope) question. I have a DVD with what I think is called a "hard letterbox". It's widescreen, but it has black bars on the top and bottom, so it's really fullscreen. I want to change it to "real" widescreen.

I just want to crop the video and cut the black bars off so it will look decent and fill the whole screen when viewed on a widescreen portable dvd player. Is there a simple way to do this, and not loose any quality?

It's a DVD-5, so it won't need any compressing, and it has no menus.

I've searched the forums and guides, but I didn't really come up with anything. Any suggestions?

[live4ever]

This would entail re-encoding the video (some quality will be lost while re-sizing).

[FulciLives]

You will have to re-encode as said by live4ever.

If it is NTSC you cut 60 from the top and 60 from the bottom then resize to 720x480 ... I should point out this is if the DVD is 720x480 to begin with as it should be if it is a commercial NTSC DVD.

If it is PAL you cut 72 from the top and 72 from the bottom then resize to 720x576 ... I should point out this is if the DVD is 720x576 to begin with as it should be if it is a commercial PAL DVD.

That will convert 4:3 WS into 16x9 WS

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[guns1inger]

When you reencode, and when you author, make sure you have the 16:9 flags set as well.

[wwaag]

Try DVD Rebuilder (freeware, although you must have an encoder). It has an option for recoding 4:3 letterbox to 16:9. Once set up, it's very easy to use.

wwaag

[mjvgiese]

Oh, cool! I never thought of trying Rebuilder for this project. I've used Rebuilder on some of my other backups, so I already have it installed and everything! I'll try that first, I'm anxious to see how it turns out.

Thanks, and I'll post back with my results when I get it done!