XMedia Recode - Crop video with video copy?

[thegdog]

Question for the group.

I switched over to Mac a few years ago and had sadly abandoned using XMedia Recode since it is only available for Windows. I did see a report recently that it did run fairly well with Crossover for Mac, so decided to give it a shot.

It does run, but one of the things I was hoping to use it for doesn't seem to work as I remember it did on Windows. But since it's been a while, I thought I would ask the group.

Can you crop a video if you are just copying over the video and not converting it?

For me in Crossover, it doesn't seem to work. I add the project to the queue and run it, but the video is not cropped.

What I am doing:
Load video file.
Format tab: Select MP4 format and M4V extension.
Video tab: Change Mode to Copy.
Audio tab: Change Mode to Copy.
Filters/Preview tab: Click on Crop timeline, then select the crop values, noting that the Video Size does change. I also note that it changes in the preview window.
Click "Add to queue" in top menu bar. Then click "Encode".

It goes through the process in about 7 seconds. But when I play the output video, it has not been cropped.

As a test, I tried changing the Video from Copy to Convert and ran it again, and then cancelled it after a couple of minutes. The output file was indeed cropped.

So hence my question if video can be cropped if you are just copying over the video and not converting it?

Thanks!

[poisondeathray]

Can you crop a video if you are just copying over the video and not converting it?

Not possible

It requires re-encoding

[jagabo]

With some codecs it's possible to set the codec's internal cropping flags without re-encoding.

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/397422-MKVToolNix-crop-zoom-4-3-letterbox-to-16-9#post2584530

[thegdog]

Can you crop a video if you are just copying over the video and not converting it?

Not possible

It requires re-encoding

Thanks. Appreciate the response.

[thegdog]

With some codecs it's possible to set the codec's internal cropping flags without re-encoding.

https://forum.videohelp.com/threads/397422-MKVToolNix-crop-zoom-4-3-letterbox-to-16-9#post2584530

Interesting. Will take a look at that and see how that works.

Thanks!

[jagabo]

Codec usually work with fixed size blocks internally. For example, a frame may be divided into 16x16 blocks of pixels. When the frame width or height isn't evenly divisible by the block size the codec internally pads the data at the edges of the frame to the next largest number of blocks. For example, a 1080 line high video would require 67.5 16x16 blocks. So the codec adds 8 lines to the height to make the frame 68 blocks high (1088 lines). Upon decompression those extra 8 lines need to be cropped away to restore the original 1080 line image. That's what the internal cropping flags are all about.