Usefull to remove black bars?

[Teykila]

Hi,

I'm using MeGUI to encode my DVDs in x264 mkvs.

I used to select keep input resolution and result were fine.

I came across some thread where people where cropping black bars before encoding.

What is the use of removing black bars at top and bottom? The displayed mkv on 16:9 TV will still have black bars to keep aspect ratio no?

Thanks.

[Teykila]

ok, i found my answer with another thread. I won't bother removing the black bars.

[jagabo]

Suppose 2.4:1 TVs become popular sometime in the future. That TV will pillarbox your 16:9 videos to fill out the 2.4:1 frame. If your video was 2.4:1 movie in a 16:9 frame with letterbox bars, you will have a little picture with big black borders on all four sides. If you had cropped away the black borders before encoding the picture will fill the screen of that 2.4:1 TV.

That's one argument for cropping away borders. One argument against cropping is that some players can't handle non-standard frame sizes. Some Blu-ray players can play MP4 or MKV files that are 1920x1080, but can't play 1920x800.

[Teykila]

Thanks for the answer, that is a very good argument.

So if i crop black bars, it is the player that will add black bars to keep aspect ratio if i understand well. Or is it the display equipement?

[jagabo]

So if i crop black bars, it is the player that will add black bars to keep aspect ratio if i understand well. Or is it the display equipement?

Usually the player as it has to send a standard video format to the display. Another argument against cropping is that some players stretch everything to 16:9. So your cropped 2.4:1 videos will display as 16:9 with no black bars. That's getting less common though.

[hello_hello]

I'm fairly sure I've never encoded a video without cropping. I'm probably a little OCD about it but I hate video with "fuzzy" edges where the black borders begin or there's a few pixels of crud down the sides etc. I always crop it clean. I'm in Pal-land so the rules may be different, but I've never had a problem playing video because I've cropped it. Not back in the days of playing AVIs using DVD players, not these days using Bluray players to play MKVs.

When you say you elected to "keep the aspect ratio" I assume you're using anamorphic encoding? If so, anamorphic encoding uses non-sqaure pixels so it simply comes down to whether your player display it correctly (does it respect MKV/MP4 aspect ratios) or not. If not, you'll need to convert to square pixels while encoding, pretty much as you generally would when converting a DVD to AVI.

In my opinion the decision to remove the black bars is generally irrelevant to whether the video will display correctly and just one of personal choice. Once you know/decide what you player supports (anamorphic video or square pixels only) and which method you're going to use when encoding..... well anamorphic encoding using MeGUI should be fairly straight forward and give excellent results. I encode DVDs using MeGUI that way all the time.

If you're going to convert to square pixels when encoding..... well unfortunately MeGUI is still pretty much stuck in the dark ages when it comes to resizing. It won't let you resize "up" and it's restricted to using mod16 dimensions when resizing..... if you do happen to decide to convert to square pixels when encoding it's not hard to get around MeGUI's resizing limitations and do it "better" but you do need to understand a little about how calculate the video dimensions manually. If you need help there. someone will be able to assist.