I have a widescreen HDTV. Whenever I watch a recording of a non-HD program that was broadcast in letterbox the resulting image is a letter-boxed show that is centered on my screen (black bars on the top,bottom, and sides.) Is there any way to transcode this video to make it fill my screen? I think the problem is that although the TV show is 16:9 the actually image is 4:3. In other words the top and bottom black bars are part of the broadcasted show. I base this on the fact that the black on the top and bottom is "fuzzier" that the black on the sides, and that the station logo normally goes into the bottom black border. So, what I would want the transcoder to do is remove the top and bottom black borders. Is there any way to do this? Is any one else already doing this?

Thanks in advance for any help. I did search for this on the forums and came up empty handed.

When you are playing one of these recordings try pressing the <w> key. That will allow you to cycle through different aspect ratios and zoom settings. Please tell us if this works. I expect I will have the same problem with my new HDTV.

Yeah, I knew about the w key, and it does do what I want (4:3 zoom, I think). However if I could permanently change the video (maybe even reduce the size) I would rather do that. Also, when I'm zoomed in the menu gets all messed up.

I have the "opposite" problem - needing to strip the black bars on the left & right of a 4:3 program to watch it fullscreen on my 4:3 tv.

Here's the script I put together to run as a user job to do the cropping



The way I've done it a little dangerous as it could delete the original recording without the resizing being done successfully, so there's a possible improvement to be made there. Doing it this way means I don't have to mess with the database, but I probably don't recommend you doing the same way I have.

However, the ffmpeg command line is the important one. It crops the black bars from the left & right, resets the aspect to 4:3, and keeps the codecs & bitrates the same as the original DVB MPEG2 file. I found the crop values by using another program (TMPEGEnc in my case) to measure how wide the black bars are.

You could change the --cropleft & right to --croptop & bottom and add your cropping value, make the aspect 1.7777 and it should work for you for the resizing. If required, change the codecs & bitrate to match your files. Then just adapt the rest of the options (directory to place the file, etc) to however you want it to work (remember I don't recommend using my script as it has a dangerous deleting issue).

I hope that makes some kind of sense....

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