View and Download portion of YouTube video that's "boxed".

[Barrington]

Hi

Not really sure how to word this problem so I'll just blurt it out as best I can. I was looking for some really old (like 1959'ish) western TV shows I missed seeing as a kid. Yeah, I know many people consider them rubbish, but that isn't how I view them. We didn't get a TV until 1964 or thereabouts, and the reception was woeful to impossible on some channels. We had a high antenna beside the house but the TV transmission towers were over 100 miles away, so the weather had to be calm to get 2 of the 3 channels that screened those shows. The 3rd channel we could only receive in perfect conditions. As I recall I only saw one episode of Rawhide, never saw The Virginian or Gunsmoke, and missed most of the episodes of many other great shows. Did see many good old Bonanza episodes though. Also unfortunately, my region of the world doesn't have any of those special cable channels that have those old shows.

Anyway, I found some of those shows on YouTube. However, the problem is that they are often displayed in boxes rather than full screen, and surrounding the actual TV show there's often very distracting effects occurring. Pretty unwatchable in my opinion.

I was wondering if there's safe, easy to use, preferably freeware, but I am willing to consider commercial software, that can permit me to view the actual show full screen and not have that surrounding garbage.

Even better would be to download the shows for later viewing, with the garbage stripped out. That is, NOT a part of the download.

Maybe screen recorder software would work, but that would be a ridiculously slow process and thus impractical.

Some of the videos are even shown inside a display of an old style television cabinet, which may be nostalgic, but doesn't enhance the view.

I'm using Windows 8.0 on a laptop.

Thanks for your help.

Cheers.

PS. Please try to keep replies "not too technical" if possible.

[manono]

PS. Please try to keep replies "not too technical" if possible.

Buy the DVDs.

Failing that, you can download the crappy YouTube videos, crop away the extraneous garbage around the actual episodes and then reencode them. After which they'll look even worse.

[Barrington]

PS. Please try to keep replies "not too technical" if possible.

Buy the DVDs.

Failing that, you can download the crappy YouTube videos, crop away the extraneous garbage around the actual episodes and then reencode them. After which they'll look even worse.

Thanks for your reply.

Unfortunately, the cost of doing that is more than I can afford. For example, "The Virginian" ran for nine seasons. The price in my region is about $60 for just one season, so that's $540 for one whole series. Add to that several more complete TV series and it would easily cost a couple of thousand dollars. As an aged pensioners that's just not going to happen. I drive a 23 year old car that's well beyond its "Use By" date and I can't afford to replace that, so there's no way I can afford to buy old TV series on DVD, even if they do happen to be available for my region.

I just thought someone might have some helpful suggestion.

[sneaker]

manono basically already told you the solution. To say it more detailed: you need to download the video (completely) and then crop away everything you don't need. There may be some players who can do it on-the-fly, otherwise you can re-encode them to make it permament. Many softwares can do it, I'm just gonna give one example. Use VidCoder. Open the video file. Go into encoding settings. Set cropping to custom, open the preview window and adjust until you have everything you don't want cropped out. Close the video settings and preview and click "Encode". Done.