Letterboxed avi with GKnot, is it normal?

[StriderGT]

I used GKnot according to the guide and the final avi is letterboxed. Is this normal? (in order to be exactly the same as the 16:9 anamorphic DVD source) or did I do something wrong in the auto crop process of GKnot? Am I losing bitrate on those black borders?
If I haven't done anything wrong what is the point of having the top and bottom border?

[manono]

Hi-

I'm not sure I fully understand. You got rid of the black bars when you cropped, right? And you checked to see if they were all gone? I don't fully trust the Auto-crop-I remove them with the pixel crop. And then you're saying you're seeing them again when you play back the finished .avi? The player adds them back when the .avi is full screened. If you small-screen the finished .avi, there should be no black bars there, or the crop was wrong.

You lose a bit of bit rate on the borders and the black bars (not much, though). So correct me if I didn't quite understand the problem.

[StriderGT]

THX it figures i did something wrong with the cropping procedure (the black bars are visible even if not in full screen...)
Re-encode...:-)

[manono]

Hi StriderGT-

OK-live and learn-you won't make that mistake again. A couple of other things. Sometimes the black bar area will change in different parts of the movie-episode. Anime is notorious for this. So after you crop, you should scroll the movie to see if the whole thing looks OK.

In addition, sometimes when I have soft SSA subs, my computer with a GeForce2 card will add back black bars when displaying them. I have no idea why. My other computer with an ATI card doesn't do that. But I don't guess that applies in your case.

[StriderGT]

I just discovered that the movie is perfectly ok... the bars appear only when dvobsub kicks in. So we share the same question (I have GF2 GTS). Is there anything that can be done in order to get rid of those bars, propably some adjustment in the dvobsub configuration page?

[manono]

Cool-I'm not the only one that happens to (not that I wish you bad luck). It might be a question for the Subtitles forum. It had me baffled for a couple of hours one day, until I figured out the GeForce2 was doing it (I think I have the same as you). I had this movie at 640x336, and the card insisted on making it 640x360 with extra black bars. That card has lousy video quality anyway. I'm just killing time till I can replace it with a Geforce4 Ti4200 after they become more common. But it didn't do it when I took off the subs. Something about that card and DirectVobSub that don't mix well. Because, like I said, my Radeon card doesn't do that. Oh well.

[StriderGT]

You just need to unpress the button "Extend picture to 16:9" in the DirectVobSub Configure page

[manono]

Thanks for the tip StriderGT. I wound up learning something from you.