Convert 16:9 to 4:3

[costi_d]

Hello everybody.
I'm a real newbie when it comes to video editing, and I have a problem that I cannot resolve.

Here it is: my brother took some videos with a video camera, and then send me those videos in order to make a presentation for him. The files are on .vob format, resolution 720x576, 16:9 aspect ratio, but for some reason the image is centered and bordered by black margins on top, bottom, left and right.
In Bsplayer, full screen mode with Pan&Scan 0% looks like in SnapShot1 photo. I have to set Pan&Scan to around 33% in Bsplayer if I want to see only the video, without any borders.

It is possible to remove those borders and see only the centered image, but on 0% Pan&Scan?
Like I said, I have to do a presentation with the videos, and I dont know if the player used for for viewing the presentation will have the Bsplayer Pan&Scan feature, in order to display the image without the borders.
Looks like to me that the .vob files have a 4:3 aspect ratio converted to a 16:9, and I have to reconvert back to 4:3.

Until now I've tried to crop the borders with VirtualDubMode and Avidemux, but when I open the files, both programs showed me a stretched image without any borders on top and on the bottom, like in SnapShot2. I alse tried to convert the .vob files to .avi, and I ended up with the same stretched image in the video.

Any suggestions will be very appreciated.

snapshot1.jpg

[costi_d]

Here's the Snapshot2 photo with the stretched image:

snapshot2.jpg

[aedipuss]

use mediainfo on the vobs and see if it says 16/9 or 4:3. dvd spec mpeg-2 only comes as 720x576 for pal, to show widescreen there is a flag that tells the player to stretch the video to 16/9. otherwise it's shown as 4:3. a third possibility is that it's 16/9 encoded with black borders into a 4:3 box, but it's not used much.

[manono]

...but for some reason the image is centered and bordered by black margins on top, bottom, left and right.

Nope, not true.

It looks to me like your brother should have made a 4:3 DVD, but for reasons of his own decided to make it 16:9 by adding black pillar bars. The image in Snapshot2 is the actual image as stored in the 720x576 VOB files. At playback time it gets resized so the image looks 'normal' again. The only black in that DVD is to the sides. That Snapshot1 from BS Player is a red herring.

It's possible to remove the bars from the sides, but to keep the aspect ratio you'll also have to crop from the top and bottom. That's if you want to reencode it as 16:9. Or you could crop away the bars on the sides and reencode it as 4:3, which he should have done in the first place, I think.

[costi_d]

use mediainfo on the vobs and see if it says 16/9 or 4:3.

The MediaInfo says that the aspect ratio is 16:9 (see the photo attached).

It looks to me like your brother should have made a 4:3 DVD, but for reasons of his own decided to make it 16:9 by adding black pillar bars. The image in Snapshot2 is the actual image as stored in the 720x576 VOB files. At playback time it gets resized so the image looks 'normal' again. The only black in that DVD is to the sides. That Snapshot1 from BS Player is a red herring.

Aha, now I understand the problem. I thought it has something to do with camera settings, because it was the first time when my brother used it, and I guess he didn't knew how to settle properly.

It's possible to remove the bars from the sides, but to keep the aspect ratio you'll also have to crop from the top and bottom. That's if you want to reencode it as 16:9. Or you could crop away the bars on the sides and reencode it as 4:3, which he should have done in the first place, I think.

Any suggestions regarding the software I could use for doing that?
Is the first time when I'm dealing with this kind of stuff.

mediainfo.jpg

[guns1inger]

Virtualdub -

Video->Filters->Add->Null Transform
Video->Filters->Crop
Crop off the black borders
Video->Filters->Resize to 720 x 576

From here you can either save as an AVI files, then encode to mpeg-2, or frameserve to an mpeg-2 encoder.

You are likely to find that the image quality will have dr=egraded quite a bit by doing this.