Cropping Video (Best procedure) ???

[Datahead]

Hello:
I have several video I wish to crop the black bars on the top and bottom of the frames and be able to playback in 16x9 format without seeing these bars on the screen. After researching this site it sounds like VurturalDub is the best tool. There are a few questions I have.
1. Does Vdub support H264?
2. Is there a better solution or am I on the right track?
3. As I can convert to other formats if need be, I.E. Mpeg-2, Wav, dvr-ms, which would be the best format to acomplish this goal?

Thanks for any help

Ron

[Baldrick]

Just zoom! If your player supports it, software players can zoom and also many tvs and dvd players. Reconverting/cropping will mean that you lose quality.

Or if you want to crop and export to h264 video I would use handbrake or xvid4psp and convert to h264 video in a mp4 or mkv.

[G)-(OST]

Use x264vfw if you want to use VD

[guns1inger]

If the movie is wider than 16:9 (and I am assuming it is because it has black bars) then after cropping off the bars you will also have to crop off the ends of the frame (left and/or right), otherwise the TV will either distort the image or simply add the bars back on playback.

if you must go down this path then I would suggest Xvid4PSP. It will automatically detect black bars for cropping, and you can then use it's resize/crop settings to get a 16:9 frame. Be aware that any automated process like this will just do a blind centre crop. This means that it will simply extract a 16:9 window from the centre of the image, and anything outside this is lost, no matter how important it might have been.

If, on the other hand, your source is 4:3 letterboxed with a true 16:9 image in it, Xvid4PSP will find and crop the bars and leave you with a 16:9 image ready to play.

[Datahead]

Thanks guys... I totally forgot about handbrake. as to xvid4psp if I remember thats the codec file correct? So if I'm running FFDshow I shouldn't have to load that correct? I know I've used handbrake for converting h264 files back to dvd with good results.

As to the zoom when I do that and the file is in 16x9 format do I not lose some of the left and right side when viewing? I'm using Microsoft MCE hooked to my plasma for viewing.

[guns1inger]

If the file is 16:9 (1.778 : 1) then you should not lose any thing (OK, not strictly true - you will still potentially lose a little to overscan, but no more than you lose on any DVD or TV show). However a very large number of movies are shot using the 2.35 : 1 aspect ratio, which is much wider than 16:9. If you zoom (or crop) to get rid of the top and bottom bars then you will also have to lose up to 20% or more of the image form the sides, or have the image stretched vertically to fill the space.