Pixel Math and Such, DVD to iPod

[bbt.mr.squishy]

With my new video ipod, I am very excited about playing movies on the TV. The quality is okay, however I really want the best picture possible. My question is with a movie: Red vs Blue Season One. Due the nature of the filming (video capture of Halo 2) there are large black bars on top and bottom BUT IT IS NOT IN WIDESCREEN. The format is 4:3. Instead of wasting those black pixels on my 230401 pixel limit of the ipod, I want to trim the bars from the .VOB files, encode the remaining video to MPEG4 in 16:9, and the have the TV add the black bars back to the image (edit). I plan to use FFMPEG for encoding.

The purpose of this post is:
1) As this will take multiple hours and retrys, do you think it will work?
2) How do I remove the black bars?
3) What is the best possible workflow for this?

[lordsmurf]

(isn't that what a 4:3 TV does to a widescreen?)

No. That's what the DVD player does. A tv set would stretch the image to fill 4:3.

[AntnyMD]

I would encode to 3ivx MPEG4 using Diva and crop off the black bars. Use a ratio of 640x360 for your newly widescreen video. It will not have sound. To get sound, demux the audio and convert it to AIFF. Open up both video and audio in QuickTime Pro and export to an MP4 container with video set to passthrough.

If you have MPEG Streamclip, all you will need to do is get the crop values from Diva and input those into MPEG Streamclip. Streamclip will encode the 3ivx and audio for you into a .MOV container. You'll be good to go.

Don't waste time with multiple hours and retries. Do short clips of five minutes or less to perfect your technique. Once you have it down, then do the whole movie.