Fixing 2.35:1 film in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio

I apologize if this is off-topic, but I suppose the relation to XBMC is that all of my video content is organized and played through XBMC and it was the Aspect Ratio property that lead me to notice this...

A lot of my movies are clearly recorded in 2.35:1, however, XBMC lists them as 1.78:1. I presume this is because the video has black bars physically in the frames. I was wondering if people were familiar with any good tools to cut these black bars in batch and if I would notice any major difference in the physical size of the file after this is done. Certainly the frames would be smaller, but I don't know how well the more popular compressions deal with these... perhaps it would not make much of a difference.

Anyway, does anyone know some software for this? Also, after I cut the black bars would I have to delete them from my library and rescan from scratch?

Handbrake will crop the black bars off films.

JR

To crop you will have to re-encode.

This will take time, and yes there will be a quality loss.

Whether you will notice or not depends how good you are at encoding and how fussy you are about quality. Most people encode their DVDs using H264 with a RF of maybe 18-20 and what they get looks 95% the same as the DVD. It is good enough for them, they can't see the difference.

Personally I can see the difference so most of the time I just leave my DVDs untouched and who cares about the aspect ratio flags.

For me the only info on XBMC that I care about is info that determines whether I will watch a movie or not. Runtime - maybe I don't have time for a long movie. Score - maybe I don't feel like watching a 5/10 movie. Genre - etc.

But aspect ratio? I don't care, I don't even look at this media flag. It makes no difference to whether I choose to watch the movie so it is irrelevant to me.

You only loose quality if you encode them at a lower quality if he's only interested in cropping the black borders then he could maintain the original file size so there would be no quality loss especially as your no longer encoding the black borders either

Although it would be a lot of time and work for such a minor detail its a shame you cant disable XBMC from pulling the stream details when you play a file then you could use nfo's and add the correct AR, I've tried this with "Extract thumbnails and Video information" disabled but it still reverts when you play the file or at least in the build I'm using

>>X<< Wrote:You only loose quality if you encode them at a lower quality if he's only interested in cropping the black borders then he could maintain the original file size so there would be no quality loss especially as your no longer encoding the black borders either

No, every time you transcode to a lossy codec there is a quality loss. Take a guess what the 'lossy' part of lossy codec means?

Even if you take a 7Mbps MPEG2 stream and re-encode it using the very highest x264 settings at 7Mbps there will be a quality loss.

Like I said already, maybe you will not notice it. Personally I do.

It is important for the OP to understand this so he can make his decision based on the facts.

x264 does have a lossless mode but going from lossy > lossless will result in the output being many times larger than the input.

Unless you have a movie that was produced as 2.35 to 1, encoded to 2.35 to 1 and watch it on a flat screen tv that is 2.35 to 1, it is all pointless.

voochi Wrote:No, every time you transcode to a lossy codec there is a quality loss. Take a guess what the 'lossy' part of lossy codec means?

Even if you take a 7Mbps MPEG2 stream and re-encode it using the very highest x264 settings at 7Mbps there will be a quality loss.

Like I said already, maybe you will not notice it. Personally I do.

It is important for the OP to understand this so he can make his decision based on the facts.

Knowing information is being lost and seeing quality loss are two different things if you can see it at high bitrates or low RF much lower than 18-20 then good for you

voochi Wrote:x264 does have a lossless mode but going from lossy > lossless will result in the output being many times larger than the input.

Obviously

>>X<< Wrote:Knowing information is being lost and seeing quality loss are two different things if you can see it at high bitrates or low RF much lower than 18-20 then good for you

Which I already covered in full in my very first post -
"Whether you will notice or not depends how good you are at encoding and how fussy you are about quality. Most people encode their DVDs using H264 with a RF of maybe 18-20 and what they get looks 95% the same as the DVD. It is good enough for them, they can't see the difference. "