Height in AutoGK

[darkwarrior]

Hi. I've been using AutoGK a while casually and had a lot of success but recently I've tried repeatedly to rip and convert my Red Vs Blue DVDs to little success.

The quality turns out amazing but the top and bottom of the screen is cropped, removing the subtitles for one of the characters, Lopez. It also trims the top of the titles in the opening. Its not a HUGE deal but it does spoil the experience when you can't understand what one of the characters, who sometimes has a great deal of dialogue, is saying.

I tried lowering the width to maybe make the overall video smaller and fit it on to no real success except once I got half of the subs to appear.

Does anyone have any advice for this?

Additionally the subs problem is prevalent in a lot of my Japanese/South Korean DVDs where they appear out of sync or cut off. Is this something I should not be using AutoGk for?

Thanks for reading and I appreciate any help.

[BigDid]

... The quality turns out amazing but the top and bottom of the screen is cropped, removing the subtitles for one of the characters, Lopez. It also trims the top of the titles in the opening...
Hi and welcome to the forum,

You an keep original proportions by selecting "Override input AR+ Original" in the hidden options (Ctrl/F9). The resulting can be verified by doing a preview.

This is covered in the tutorial that can be popped up by clicking the "about" button in AutoGK + the help tab.

Did

[darkwarrior]

I did what you said, override+Original and previewed it but ended up with the same result, it crops the top and bottom black parts that contain the subtitles and some of the titles that appear at the top.

Any ideas?

[CWR03]

Check "Tune auto crop parameters," set Threshold to 0, and crop to your liking (or set all cropping to 0).

[BigDid]

Yep, my bad. I should not contribute early in the morning. :o
Have confused AR and No Crop. No crop given by CWR03 is the way to go.

Did

[darkwarrior]

THanks a lot guys, worked a treat. Dunno why it doesn't have a heigh option as well as a width in the non secret functions but oh well.

Thanks again.

[CWR03]

Dunno why it doesn't have a heigh option as well as a width in the non secret functions but oh well.
It's to help keep it "Auto."

[Knocks]

Why does it trim the height in the first place? I am converting a 720x576 MPEG2 video, and AutoGK insists on cropping it to 720x544 by default. Is there something wrong with 720x576 that AugoGK wants you to lose 32 vertical lines over it?

[manono]

You're not losing 32 rows of pixels. It's not being cropped as you say. Instead, it's being resized. When you notice the lost subs, are you watching on the computer monitor or on a standalone DVD/MPEG-4 player feeding into your TV set?

Is there something wrong with 720x576...

Yes, it has bad AR for a 1:1 AVI. It hasn't been resized yet.

[Knocks]

What do you mean by resizing? It had 576 vertical lines and now it has 544. And what does it mean to be "bad for a 1:1 avi"? Why can't the input and output resolutions be the same?

By the way, I am not having any subs problems. I just want to know the purpose of the change in resolution.

[manono]

Sorry, it was darkwarrior, the original poster, that was having trouble with his subs.

Your PAL DVD is 4:3 720x576. The video, as stored on the vobs, has bad aspect ratio. People are tall and thin, and round things are ovals. A 4:3 PAL DVD when resized for playback in a DVD player is resized to 768x576 (576 x (4/3) = 768). Then it becomes 1:1. Similar 1.33:1 resolutions might include your 720x544, 640x480, 576x432, 512x384, etc.

Here's a round Chinese gong on an unresized 720x576 4:3 PAL DVD:
http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/333/720x576an3.th.png (http://img90.imageshack.us/my.php?image=720x576an3.png)
http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/333/720x576an3.png

Click on the pic or the link to see it fullsized 720x576. And it's not round, is it? Here it is resized to 720x544:

http://img127.imageshack.us/img127/1153/720x544su4.th.png (http://img127.imageshack.us/my.php?image=720x544su4.png)
http://img127.imageshack.us/img127/1153/720x544su4.png

Now it's 1:1 and round again. I cropped some from the left and right to maintain the AR, but nothing is missing from the top or bottom, is there? DVDs have to be resized to display properly, by either 4:3 or 16:9, depending on the DAR (Display Aspect Ratio). AVIs that have already been resized are 1:1 and only have to be scaled.

Why can't the input and output resolutions be the same?

Put simply, the PAL DVD is 1.25:1 (720/576=1.25). It contains video that is 1.33:1. It has to be resized to some 1.33:1 resolution.

Maybe Doom9's AR guide will help some:

http://www.doom9.org/aspectratios.htm

[Knocks]

Thank you for the explanation. A couple of clarifiers. I am not dealing with VOBs, and I am not looking to play this file on a DVD player. Here are the details.

I have an 11-minute PAL video file that was captured/encoded as a 672MB MPG file. It is in 720x576 and it does not appear squished or distorted when I play it with Media Player Classic. In fact, it looks great, so the only problem is that I'm not willing to give an 11-minute video 672MB of real estate, so I decided to convert it to MPEG-4. So far I have tried AVI.net, AutoGK, and NeroDigital, and I am dissatisfied with all results.

Converting to NeroDigital AVC Standard (2MB/s, 2 passes) resulted in a 184MB .mp4 file with small but visible artifacts. Nero Recode resized the video to 720x544 automatically.

AVI.net gave me an even blockier video of 173MB. I told it not to resize (this was before I read this thread), and the video looks stretched vertically (people are too skinny).

AutoGK also auto-resized to 720x544 and produced the best results, but that's probably because I used Full Quality and the .avi is 592MB, which again is too much for 11 minutes.

So I guess I have 2 questions now.

1) What size/bitrate should I realistically expect this file to be? I would prefer not to see artifacts, and I've pulled it off before with Nero Digital but that was an original VOB, so this is different.

2) Back to resizing. The videos produced by Nero Recode and AutoGK are actually smaller (meaning they are played in a smaller window) than the original MPG when played in Media Player Classic. If the original plays with no image distortion at 720x572 and resizing to 720x544 results in a smaller on-screen picture, what are the benefits of resizing? I understand that it's now 1:1 and a real 1.32 ratio, but it's a smaller picture now!

[manono]

It is in 720x576 and it does not appear squished or distorted when I play it with Media Player Classic.

For the purposes of this discussion, an MPG can be treated as a VOB. DVDs are MPEG-2. It gets resized. When viewing in MPC, you're seeing the resized MPG. It is not being displayed at 720x576.

1) No way to tell in advance. Different videos compress differently. Since it's a capture, it's probably all full of noise and doesn't compress well. If you enclose the AutoGK log, then I (or many other people) can give some more educated advice.

However, based on what you're saying, you should either choose a much smaller width (512, maybe), or do a 2-pass encode, letting AutoGK choose the width based on the results of the compression test. That way it'll be artifact free.

2) Your AVI is 720x544, and MPC is playing the MPG resized to 768x576.

[Knocks]

I would like to keep the 720 width at the cost of larger file size. So I tried AutoGK again with a fixed width of 720 and a custom size (I have tried 175 and 180 MB so far), and the output file is a 74 MB avi for some reason. I've attached the log.

[manono]

Expected quality of first pass size: 31.84%
Even had you gotten the size you wanted, it still wouldn't look so good. You'd need a size roughly twice what you want to have it look decent at that resolution. Since you wound up with a size less than half of what you asked for, it must really look bad.

Your undersize is a different issue. Did you perhaps install a newer XviD over an already existing XviD, without first uninstalling the previous one? Doing that can make for unpredictable file sizes.

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=72679

Q 6.3

Also, AutoGK says your source is interlaced. If it's really interlaced, and really has to be deinterlaced, then deinterlacing, no matter how good the deinterlacer, will leave behind artifacts. What kind of a video is this? The reason I ask is that if it's a movie or something else shot on film, the chances are good it isn't interlaced and can be made progressive again without the use of a deinterlacer.