Why do most people crop out the black bars when ripping a DVD?

[DarrellS]

I'm not sure anyone is worried about the file size difference these days but how the video is going to look on your TV. Hello_hello seems to misunderstand what I was trying to say, again.

I don't want to see the junk on the sides of a 4:3 movie that was covered up with a 4:3 TV but is not covered up on a wide screen TV. I would show you some good samples but I've already cleaned up most of the videos on my hard drives.

If you notice the left side of the first video, the edge runs up the screen at an angle and is not a straight line. It may not be noticable to you but it would bother me if I was watching it on my TV. The second video has over an inch of gray on each side which would be very noticable if watching on a wide screen TV. The last video is a terrible video but is a good example of a video that would need to be cropped to look right. I've edited many videos with different colored noisy lines on the top, bottom and sides of videos that took up a lot of space. These would look horrible on a widescreen TV.

[hello_hello]

I'm not sure anyone is worried about the file size difference these days but how the video is going to look on your TV. Hello_hello seems to misunderstand what I was trying to say, again.

No, I understood perfectly. Well the part which made sense. I'm still not sure what you were referring to regarding PowerDVD displaying the video as it should be displayed. What does it do differently to other players?

I don't want to see the junk on the sides of a 4:3 movie that was covered up with a 4:3 TV but is not covered up on a wide screen TV. I would show you some good samples but I've already cleaned up most of the videos on my hard drives.

As I tried to explain, some/many TVs overscan when displaying 4:3 video so they cover up the crud just as a 4:3 TV would. Mine does. You can choose 4:3 under the screen adjustment menu. When you do, the sides of the image beyond the 4:3 area in the middle effectively become inactive. The TV overscans 4:3 video just as a 4:3 TV would. It's been a while since I messed around with it so I can't remember how it interacts with a standalone player, but when viewing video with a PC, putting the TV in 4:3 mode effectively squishes the 16:9 screen area down to 4:3 size. To display stuff correctly using a PC, you can change the video card's output to 4:3 dimensions, or you can simply change the aspect ratio of a 4:3 video to 16:9 (easy enough to do via MPC-HC's right click menu). Either way will work..... but the upshot of it is you end up with a 4:3 image being overscanned as it normally would be.... by a 16:9 TV. I'm watching video from a 4:3 vob file with the TV in 4:3 mode as we speak.... just to refresh my memory as to how it works.

I don't watch much 4:3 video and I crop it when encoding anyway, so it's not an issue for me, but I was just pointing out you can overscan 4:3 video using at least some 16:9 TVs, if not all of them. It's probably a standard feature, I'm not sure. Ironically though, when my TVs in 4:3 mode I can't disable overscanning at all. Using MPC-HC's zoom function as a comparison, I've concluded in 4:3 mode my TV overscans by about 5%.

[DarrellS]

I'm not sure anyone is worried about the file size difference these days but how the video is going to look on your TV. Hello_hello seems to misunderstand what I was trying to say, again.

No, I understood perfectly. Well the part which made sense. I'm still not sure what you were referring to regarding PowerDVD displaying the video as it should be displayed. What does it do differently to other players?

I don't want to see the junk on the sides of a 4:3 movie that was covered up with a 4:3 TV but is not covered up on a wide screen TV. I would show you some good samples but I've already cleaned up most of the videos on my hard drives.

As I tried to explain, some/many TVs overscan when displaying 4:3 video so they cover up the crud just as a 4:3 TV would. Mine does. You can choose 4:3 under the screen adjustment menu. When you do, the sides of the image beyond the 4:3 area in the middle effectively become inactive. The TV overscans 4:3 video just as a 4:3 TV would. It's been a while since I messed around with it so I can't remember how it interacts with a standalone player, but when viewing video with a PC, putting the TV in 4:3 mode effectively squishes the 16:9 screen area down to 4:3 size. To display stuff correctly using a PC, you can change the video card's output to 4:3 dimensions, or you can simply change the aspect ratio of a 4:3 video to 16:9 (easy enough to do via MPC-HC's right click menu). Either way will work..... but the upshot of it is you end up with a 4:3 image being overscanned as it normally would be.... by a 16:9 TV. I'm watching video from a 4:3 vob file with the TV in 4:3 mode as we speak.... just to refresh my memory as to how it works.

I don't watch much 4:3 video and I crop it when encoding anyway, so it's not an issue for me, but I was just pointing out you can overscan 4:3 video using at least some 16:9 TVs, if not all of them. It's probably a standard feature, I'm not sure. Ironically though, when my TVs in 4:3 mode I can't disable overscanning at all. Using MPC-HC's zoom function as a comparison, I've concluded in 4:3 mode my TV overscans by about 5%.

I don't have powerDVD installed right now but if I remember correctly, it showed the video in a window and that window was the same size as the resolution of the DVD that you were watching and if the DVD was done correctly as most DVDs are, you would not see any black bars on the top and bottom or the sides. Sure, other players do the same thing. I wasn't trying to promote PowerDVD in any way but was agreeing with another poster that most DVDs do not need to be edited because the black bars are not there, just that your media player gives the illusion that they are there but somehow, you seemed to miss the point that I was agreeing with and went straight for the PowerDVD comment.

I was also agreeing with Jagabo that some older DVDs need to be cropped because they weren't intended to be viewed on a widescreen TV and either the picture is way too small for the screen or has ugly noise that needs to be cropped off. You didn't attack either one of their posts that I was agreeing with but went straight for my post like I was saying something totally different, which I was not. You did the same thing in the thread where I was trying to help the OP not have to re-encode his audio to AAC. You ended up saying the same thing that I did but my message was wrong because I said that AAC was mean't for MP4 and he didn't need to convert it to AAC for an MKV container. My point was that he didn't need to re-encode the audio but you saw it as me saying that AAC could not be in an MKV container, missing my point completely which you agreed with multiple times in the thread.

A widescreen TV is not going to cover up the junk on the sides of a 4:3 movie. It can't unless you upscale the picture to cover up the sides and then you would cut off their heads and their feet or you could watch the video in stretch mode to cover up the noise but then you would be watching a bunch of fat people running around and all those nice round circles in the picture would be oblonged. I like to watch my movies the way they were intended to be viewed. I guess if you watched analogue movies in stretch mode long enough that you would get used to it. A lot of cable viewers do.

If you crop the junk out of your 4:3 videos also then why attack my posts just because I didn't word it exactly the same as you would've? It just seems like you troll my posts to find something to knitpick about.

[jagabo]

A widescreen TV is not going to cover up the junk on the sides of a 4:3 movie.

Depending on the source and settings widescreen HDTVs can simulate overscan (crop the edges of the frame) before upscaling for display. Blu-ray and DVD players can also do this when sending an upscaled picture.

[hello_hello]

Well I was reading your post while being prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt.... until I got to the second last paragraph where you again contradicted something I said which I know for a fact is correct. I tested it using my own TV as I was posting to make sure I wasn't talking rubbish. My TV overscans 4:3 video when you put it in 4:3 mode. I explained how it works and I strongly suspect it'd be a standard feature for 16:9 TVs. Put it in 4:3 mode and only the centre 4:3 area of the screen remains active. Therefore it can overscan a 4:3 image exactly as a 4:3 TV would. I even checked to see how much mine overscans. I don't know if I can find another way to explain the concept to you, but I think three attempts now is enough. If you don't get it, you don't get it.

Troll your posts? What because I've disagreed with you a couple of times, once when you specifically told someone, and I quote:
"convert to AC3 which should be in the MKV container anyway, not ACC. AAC is for mp4".
Try to rewrite history now if it helps you justify being a baby and accusing me of trolling, but you told the other poster specifically to convert to the audio to AC3. I agreed with most of what you said.... I also told the poster they probably didn't need to convert the audio as they were converting AVI to MKV so as long as the audio was already in a player friendly format, they could just copy it. Later in the thread you said, and I quote:
"I stated that wrong. What I meant was that AAC is part of the MP4 spec so there is no need to encode the audio to AAC if he is just putting it in an mkv container."
So you admitted you got it wrong yourself, but I'm somehow trolling your posts because I didn't agree with what you later admitted was incorrect? How old are you exactly?

The main reason I replied to your earlier post here originally, was because of all the nonsense it contained regarding DVDs not really having black bars and something PowerDVD does to display these non-black bar DVDs correctly.... or whatever you were on about but for some reason can't remember now.
No matter what imaginings you may be imagining, I can tell you for a fact.... most movie DVDs have black bars. That's how they're created. I'd explain why they must have black bars due to the difference in aspect ratio between the movie and the DVD picture again, but I kind of suspect you still won't get it even if I do.

[manono]

My TV overscans 4:3 video when you put it in 4:3 mode. I explained how it works and I strongly suspect it'd be a standard feature for 16:9 TVs.

jagabo just above your post mentioned the player possibly being responsible for that. Before it broke I had an Oppo DVD player and it sent the entire picture to my Sony widescreen TV and I got the whole picture with no cropping or overscan or anything, both 16:9 and 4:3 DVDs. I tested once with this card jagabo made available that I made into a DVD for playing on the DVD player. After the Oppo broke we began using our Playstation 3 for viewing DVDs and it crops quite a lot of the picture, even from the sides of 4:3 DVDs. And it pisses me off. And another Sony DVD player we have crops even more.

The majority of the DVD players out there crop at least something before sending the picture on to the TV set.

[hello_hello]

My TV overscans 4:3 video when you put it in 4:3 mode. I explained how it works and I strongly suspect it'd be a standard feature for 16:9 TVs.

jagabo just above your post mentioned the player possibly being responsible for that. Before it broke I had an Oppo DVD player and it sent the entire picture to my Sony widescreen TV and I got the whole picture with no cropping or overscan or anything, both 16:9 and 4:3 DVDs. I tested once with this card jagabo made available that I made into a DVD for playing on the DVD player. After the Oppo broke we began using our Playstation 3 for viewing DVDs and it crops quite a lot of the picture, even from the sides of 4:3 DVDs. And it pisses me off. And another Sony DVD player we have crops even more.

The majority of the DVD players out there crop at least something before sending the picture on to the TV set.

I forgot to account for the fact that many players also crop part of the picture because I was having a hard enough time explaining the concept of overscanning to DarrellS, but yeah, you could lose even more of the picture that way.
In my case though I was testing with the PC connected to the TV and MPC-HC displaying the video. With the TV in 4:3 mode, and MPC-HC maximised, I lose the sides and top and bottom of the actual player off the edges of the screen (or the active 4:3 picture area), so there's no doubt the TV is overscanning.

My TV has a few different modes such as 16:9, 4:3, a couple of zoom settings and one called "screen fit" which is basically 16:9 without overscanning (it only works if the input is 720p or greater). There's no way to disable the overscanning for 4:3 mode.
Traditional CRT TVs overscan, so if a 16:9 TV is going to have a 4:3 mode which mimics a 4:3 TV it'd make sense that it overscans. Not that I'd be likely to use 4:3 mode myself as obviously maximising the media player or viewing 4:3 video full screen would normally get it to add black bars down the sides, but if you're watching original DVD video, the option to overscan is there. I'd be surpised if it's not fairly common for TVs to have a 4:3 mode, but I can't say I've experimented with too many to find out.

[DarrellS]

Well I was reading your post while being prepared to give you the benefit of the doubt.... until I got to the second last paragraph where you again contradicted something I said which I know for a fact is correct. I tested it using my own TV as I was posting to make sure I wasn't talking rubbish. My TV overscans 4:3 video when you put it in 4:3 mode. I explained how it works and I strongly suspect it'd be a standard feature for 16:9 TVs. Put it in 4:3 mode and only the centre 4:3 area of the screen remains active. Therefore it can overscan a 4:3 image exactly as a 4:3 TV would. I even checked to see how much mine overscans. I don't know if I can find another way to explain the concept to you, but I think three attempts now is enough. If you don't get it, you don't get it.

Troll your posts? What because I've disagreed with you a couple of times, once when you specifically told someone, and I quote:
"convert to AC3 which should be in the MKV container anyway, not ACC. AAC is for mp4".
Try to rewrite history now if it helps you justify being a baby and accusing me of trolling, but you told the other poster specifically to convert to the audio to AC3. I agreed with most of what you said.... I also told the poster they probably didn't need to convert the audio as they were converting AVI to MKV so as long as the audio was already in a player friendly format, they could just copy it. Later in the thread you said, and I quote:
"I stated that wrong. What I meant was that AAC is part of the MP4 spec so there is no need to encode the audio to AAC if he is just putting it in an mkv container."
So you admitted you got it wrong yourself, but I'm somehow trolling your posts because I didn't agree with what you later admitted was incorrect? How old are you exactly?

The main reason I replied to your earlier post here originally, was because of all the nonsense it contained regarding DVDs not really having black bars and something PowerDVD does to display these non-black bar DVDs correctly.... or whatever you were on about but for some reason can't remember now.
No matter what imaginings you may be imagining, I can tell you for a fact.... most movie DVDs have black bars. That's how they're created. I'd explain why they must have black bars due to the difference in aspect ratio between the movie and the DVD picture again, but I kind of suspect you still won't get it even if I do.

You left off the most important parts of that quote. I said or convert to AC3, I didn't say he had to convert to AC3. All you saw was AAC was supposed to be in MP4 and AC3 in MKV. The OP's original quote was "I want to convert my AVI files to MKV, but my WD media player only support MKVs with AAC-LC audio profile. My point was that if he wanted his MKVs to play on his WD Media player (which I own) then his best option was to copy the original audio from the AVI files that he didn't have to convert them to AAC. Every AVI that I've seen in the last 7 or 8 years has had either DivX or XviD with either MP3 or AC3. If you had a WD Media Player then you would know how picky it is with some MP4 and AAC audio in an MKV container.

OK, most of your DVDs have black bars and most of mine and Moviegeek's DVDs don't have black bars.

Here's your first quote in this thread "I always crop black borders because much DVD or Bluray video has "fuzzy" black borders rather than nice clean black edges and whether it's rational or not they kind of annoy me. Same with any crud down the sides.... but I guess that's as I mainly use a PC for playback and the TV doesn't over-scan when displaying video from the PC (my choice).

Then you spend the rest of this thread hounding me for saying the same thing, just like the AAC thread. I didn't read this post til just now so I wasn't even sure why you were so entent on bringing up overscan or spending half the thread talking about file size.


What you were trying to explain as overscan with 4:3 video is called stretch mode. I've seen a lot of overscanning and it all looks like crap to me. Some folks may have seen overscanning that works the way they want it to but it's my experience that it's total garbage. My friend spent $1500 on an Onkyo receiver because of the overscanning. I couldn't convince him that his picture looked like crap and every video that he captured with his Philips DVD recorder had the sides cut off. Not just the overscan lines but half of the credits on the sides of the video. As for TVs being set to 4:3 by default, I was so pissed off when I bought my Samsung 1080p and hooked everthing up and my picture looked like $h!t. I ordered digital cable thinking that would help and it still looked like crap. Finally went into settings and switched it to 16:9 and haven't had a complaint since.

I'll disreguard your "baby" remarks and "how old are you" but I can see why I've been getting IMs lately from people asking me for help and stating that they try to get help in the forums but they can't seem to get any help. The threads start out with someone asking for help and four or five pages of people arguing back and forth and calling each other names.

[hello_hello]

You left off the most important parts of that quote. I said or convert to AC3, I didn't say he had to convert to AC3. All you saw was AAC was supposed to be in MP4 and AC3 in MKV.

All I said regarding anything you posted in that thread was I don't know where the "AC3 should be in an MKV, not AAC which is for MP4" rule comes from. That's it. Nothing else. I didn't contradict anything else you said. A few posts later you admitted you stated it incorrectly and that's where the topic ended. Until now.... where you've decided to drag it over into an unrelated thread and complain about it like a child. Get over it.

OK, most of your DVDs have black bars and most of mine and Moviegeek's DVDs don't have black bars.

Have you even considered the topic of this thread? It's "Why do most people crop out the black bars when ripping a DVD?" The black bars which for reasons I can't even begin to comprehend you're claiming don't exist.

I'm pretty sure Moviegeek's post referred to the player adding the black bars back if you crop them from the DVD when encoding. He even posted a link to a page which explains why DVDs have black bars. What is it about that you just don't get?
I've literally encoded hundreds of DVDs and I've cropped black bars from most of them, so you can keep repeating your belief DVDs don't have black bars as much as you like, but you'll just continue to be wrong, and seem fairly clueless in the process. Everybody else in this thread has been discussing the pro's and con's of cropping the black bars which for some reason you want to believe don't exist.
Here you go, letterboxing for dummies.
"Letterboxing is the practice of transferring film shot in a widescreen aspect ratio to standard-width video formats while preserving the film's original aspect ratio. The resulting videographic image has mattes (black bars) above and below it; these mattes are part of the image (i.e., of each frame of the video signal)."

Here's your first quote in this thread "I always crop black borders because much DVD or Bluray video has "fuzzy" black borders rather than nice clean black edges and whether it's rational or not they kind of annoy me. Same with any crud down the sides.... but I guess that's as I mainly use a PC for playback and the TV doesn't over-scan when displaying video from the PC (my choice).

Then you spend the rest of this thread hounding me for saying the same thing, just like the AAC thread. I didn't read this post til just now so I wasn't even sure why you were so entent on bringing up overscan or spending half the thread talking about file size.

Hounding you?? You're replying to me, or are you too invested in self denial to realise?
Oh well.... I've posted in forums long enough to know when childish trolling accusations don't have any effect the next step for someone who can't stand being disagreed with is to play the victim card. I'd guess you're only a couple of posts away now from a reference to Hitler or Nazi Germany. Please stop lying though. Not only didn't I hound you in the other thread, I only commented on one thing you said and never replied to or commented on another of your posts. The thread is there in black and white for all to see, so why lie about it?
Speaking of self-denial.... I didn't bring up over-scanning. I simply replied to the post you made which mentioned it. Well no, I guess I mentioned it first by saying I have it disabled, but then I replied to your post to point out many newer TVs can still overscan 4:3 video, while stating again I prefer not to rely on it and crop the crud myself when encoding. Why make such a huge issue out of that?
And as you seem to need to have it explained to you, part of the discussion on whether or not to crop the black bars involves the effect it'll have on file size and any possible effect their presence may have on the way the active picture area is encoded. Sorry if you don't get it, but that's the reason for my posts on the subject.

What you were trying to explain as overscan with 4:3 video is called stretch mode. I've seen a lot of overscanning and it all looks like crap to me.

FFS, which part of "in 4:3 mode, only the centre 4:3 part of the screen is active" is too hard for you to understand? If you won't believe me, maybe you'll believe the TV manufacturer. The same manufacturer as for your TV. Which by your own admission caused you to order digital cable because you didn't understand it's different display modes, and while even now you obviously still don't understand the distinction between over-scanning and stretching, here you are trying to tell me how it works.
The Size option will change the aspect ratio that your TV displays the incoming signal in. Depending on the resolution of the incoming signal (For example: 1080p, 1080i, 720p, 480p, 480i) some pictures sizes will be grayed out. There are 6 different options for Size;
1. 16:9: Optimizes the TV's aspect ratio to display a 16:9 program. This mode will also stretch a 4:3 aspect ratio to fit your screen.
2. 4:3: Optimizes the TV's aspect ratio to display a 4:3 program by adding black bars to the left and right.

I'll disreguard your "baby" remarks and "how old are you" but I can see why I've been getting IMs lately from people asking me for help and stating that they try to get help in the forums but they can't seem to get any help. The threads start out with someone asking for help and four or five pages of people arguing back and forth and calling each other names.

Well if you hadn't have been childish enough to accuse me of trolling there wouldn't have been any name calling, but if you want to compound silly with hypocrisy, that's your choice.

By the way, here's a screenshot of a DVD I had sitting on my desk. Feel free to take note of the black bars. You know, the ones we're discussing whether or not should be cropped when encoding, despite your belief they aren't there.