How to crop the black lines out an MKV (and lose a bit of the sides)

[marklittlevai]

I have tried MKVmergegui to exract annoying subs and audio tracks that i do not want. but now all i want to do to 'finish' my movies perfectly is to crop out the top, bottom and side just enough so that it the whole film in a little and loses the black lines.

I still want the video to be kept in 1080p HD and in MKV but i want it to fit corner to corner 16:9 on my tv without having to use silly stretching zooms that make the actors look stick thin lol

mkv merge has an option to crop, but i can not get it to work. I enter the parameters to crop 25, 25, 25, 25 for left-top-right-bottom.. but when the mkv is MUXED it only seems to shave the side and the top off (or so it appears in VLC)

Ultimately my MKV's are only used on my Western Digital WDTV

help..

[Baldrick]

Cropping requires that you reconvert which means you lose some quality. But you can use handbrake to crop, under the picture tab can you crop so you get a 16:9 video frame size. Or other video converters/editors like xmedia recode, avidemux, etc.

[marklittlevai]

Handbrake huh.. thanks i will try this.

how long would a 2hr movie take to crop out / encode?

I am aware that some quality will be lost by 'zooming in' the picture.. but on the other hand these films seem so small on my 42" tv with those black letterbox line that the HD imigary can not even be seen anyway.. not unless i move my couch like right in front of the tv lol

Thanks for your help

PS where can i download this HandBrake from mate?

[Baldrick]

1080p encoding takes time....I hope you have a core i7 or better.

Click on handbrake for download links. Or maybe Ripbot264 is even better.

[marklittlevai]

and fianlly..

is it best to demux the mkv first, convert (crop) the video, and then re-mux them topgether again?

Mark

[Baldrick]

You don't have to demux. You can set to copy the audio part in both handbrake and ripbot264 to avoid audio reconversion.

[marklittlevai]

Hi .. again

i tried hand brake and slected custom cropping and enetered 20 off the sides and 20 off the top and bottom (20,20,20,20)

the video enoded ok but the top bar was bigger than the bottom and a bit too much of the right hand side was taken off.

is there a good formula to cropping a regular widescreen movie to 'fill the screen' ?

Thanks

[marklittlevai]

I'm new to forums by the way, so not sure if i've posted this in the right area..

thats why i opened another thread earlier, for more responses and a general input from loads of people..

it doesn't seem like a very easy thing to do - cropping, so i'll play around this it and report back soon baldrick.

thanks for trying

[freebird73717]

Does your TV have a zoom feature? That might be the simplest way to accomplish what you want.

edit
sorry didn't see your comment about "don't say zoom button".

[jagabo]

I am aware that some quality will be lost by 'zooming in' the picture.. but on the other hand these films seem so small on my 42" tv with those black letterbox line that the HD imigary can not even be seen anyway.. not unless i move my couch like right in front of the tv lol

Simply cropping the black bars away probably will not make the picture fill your picture screen. If you have a 2.35:1 movie in a 1.78:1 (16:9) frame, your player restore the black bars you cropped away. If you want to see no black bars you have to either distort the frame (ie stretch it vertically, or squish it horizontally) or crop away the sides of the picture in addition to the black bars -- leaving a 16:9 frame.

[marklittlevai]

Well i have tried cropping in mkvmergeGui and this does actually crop when i run the video in VLC player. but on my WDTV it looks exactly the same. here are my settings:

(i assume you can click to open this image!!?)

*****

Now here are my settings in HandBrake using the cropping feature, which actually re encodes the video, as apposed to just muxing the parameters in to the MKV (in mkvmerge)
HANDBRAKE:


but heres the outcome on my tv!:





I have marked out where the tv edges are.. as you can see, it hasn't quite worked as planned. i thought by chopping of some of the edges the TV would automaticaly pull the picture closer and thus losing the black bars at the top.

[jagabo]

Well i have tried cropping in mkvmergeGui and this does actually crop when i run the video in VLC player.

Enlarge VLC to full screen. The black bars will come back.

but on my WDTV it looks exactly the same. here are my settings:

Like I said earlier, the player will restore the cropped borders. It keeps the 1080 pixel image height and adds borders to the edges of the picture to fill out the 1920 pixel wide screen. The player tries to maintain the proper pixel aspect ratio (1:1 in this case).

Crop both the width and the height and leave a 16:9 ratio frame size if you want the video to fill a 16:9 screen.

[marklittlevai]

Yes i have tried cropping the top and bottom also, but it cuts the top / bottom from the film, not the black bars. please see my image (bad image) demonstration.


I need a step by step guide really (for an app like handbrake). i'm farely good with technology but this is confusing the cr*p outta me.

images would be great

[jagabo]

It looks like a 2:35:1 movie in a 16:9 frame. Crop to 1440x816. That's close to a 16:9 ratio but maintains mod 16 for both dimensions. If you want to be more accurate crop to 1448x816. What butchery.

[marklittlevai]

do you mean like this

[Attachment 8832 - Click to enlarge]
or

this

[Attachment 8833 - Click to enlarge]

[jagabo]

I don't see any images.

[marklittlevai]

you have to click the attachment 8832 and 8833 for some reason???

[jagabo]

I just get an error message that says "invalid attachment" when I click on the links.

[Baldrick]

I just get an error message that says "invalid attachment" when I click on the links.

They works fine here....But I don't know why vbulletin shows them as just attachment-links.


edit: Posting images. It works fine.

[jagabo]

The links still don't work for me. I've tried 2 different browsers. But I can see Baldrick's images.

I don't use that software but it looks to me like you're resizing to 1448x816, not cropping to 1448x816. Just set the top and bottom crops to 132, the left and right crops to 236.

[manono]

I don't see the first set either. I see the recent ones fine.

[marklittlevai]

ok i will try this later this evening. thanks guys

[thegeeman]

Have you tried uncropMKV? Its the encoder within multiavchd. When you change the resize drop down (e.g to 1920x1080), it will show you a preview of the output; generally works pretty well in all instances. Encode time is approx equivalent to video runtime, but that is pc spec dependant.

[marklittlevai]

No i have not tried this programme.

i will later though. thanks

[jagabo]

If the movie isn't 2.35:1 you'll have to adjust the cropping accordingly. Crop the black borders top and bottom. Determine the remaining height. Then use

width = height * 16 / 9

to determine the width required create a 16:9 frame. Crop the two sides to leave that amount. For best results adjust the numbers so that the remaining frame is mod8 or mod16.

[marklittlevai]

Hi
I tried uncropMKV on my XP machine, as soon as i opened an MKV, it crashed.

tried it on my windows7 machine and this happened as soon as i opened an mkv (only a 1 min long vid too!! so not much to load up)




Guys, thanks for al your help. i might tinker around with it over the next week or so, but it sounds as if it's pretty much NOT a common thing to do out here on the web .. or i'll just wait for these new 21:9 tv's that are coming out, they look great.

[marklittlevai]

UPDATE: SOLVED

I imported the letterbox style MKV (a clip from star wars) in to handbrake, disabled the audio track and set the following parameters


Then i encoded the MKV, and what do ya know!! it's a perfect full screen on my TV with no letterbox and more importantly, no image stretching.
then i put the original MKV (with AC3 audo track) and the new cropped MKV in mkvmergeGui, un-ticked the original video track, set the fps on video (or audio?!?) to 23.976 fps and clicked the MUX button..

jobs a good'n!

So really, the first guy here who posted was right, it was just me doing something wrong. i think i was cropping the sides, but not widening the overall picture.. but nevermind

[marklittlevai]

UPDATE: NOT SOLVED!

ok it turned out i was just cropping a vid that was already 1400x1080

so the output was still gonna stay 1400x1080


what i want to do is zoom a 1400x816 vid to 1400x1080 and crop the sides

back to square one.

think i'll just wait for the 21:9 ratio tv's to come out lol

damn technology

[jagabo]

The player zooms into the frame until either the top and bottom hit the edges of the screen, or the left and right hit the edges of the screen. Even a small frame like 256x144 will fill a 16:9 screen because the dimensions of the frame are a 16:9 ratio.

If you want an image with no black borders on a 16:9 screen crop away any borders in the video itself then crop away the other two edges of the frame until you have a 16:9 frame. It's as simple as that.

[manono]

Nevermind, was answering a question that got removed.