Handbrake vs. BdRebuilder WRT Cropping

[ron spencer]

Both Handbrake and BDRebuilder make great encodes. But the Handbrake crowd seems big on cropping black bars, while, it seems to me, that BDRebuilder in the regular encoding mode does not? Why is this? If one wants to make a "proper" encode/backup, should the black bars be cropped away or not? Perhaps it makes a difference if one wants to burn. For example, a Handbrake encode might end up creating an awesome looking encode from a 1920x1080 source that ends up being 1920x800, while BDRebuilder will have an output of 1920x1080.

thanks!

[sum_guy]

It boils down to personal preference but here's how I look at it... I don't mess with the black bars at all, I want original size. I want the video to be as close to original as possible, dimensions are secondary to quality for me.

[ron spencer]

Some say that it is bad to encode the black bars...but hasn't Hollywood already done that? Otherwise one would get 1920x800 for a 2.40 aspect ratio movie, when in reality the frame size is 1920x1080

[poisondeathray]

blu-ray doesn't support 1920x800 . If you are authoring a BD disc, you need to use 1920x1080

[ron spencer]

blu-ray doesn't support 1920x800 . If you are authoring a BD disc, you need to use 1920x1080

So that is it then....BDRebuilder encodes the full movie without cropping black bars to ensure that one can burn to BD-R and play as a Bluray. If you used Handbrake and cropped, you would be out of luck with respect to optical media and hardware compatibility.

So I guess the real rule of thumb is that if you need hardware compatibility, do not crop. If you are using a media centre, Xbox, etc or PC, it is ok to crop.