16:9 encoded as 4:3?

[KCode]

I'm now trying to rip House (S01), and the showes are in 16:9 format, but it is on the disk as a 4:3 movie (The black bars are part of the show) How would I re-crop the movie to get rid of the black bars, without losing quality? Thanks.

[Awatef]

Your DVD is not 16:9 anamorphic, it is letterboxed. You won't gain anything by cropping and encoding 16:9 anamorphic. Set your TV so that you won't see the black bars.

[kumi]

DVD-Rebuilder can crop a 4:3 Letterbox stream to 16:9 anamorphic.

[Awatef]

It's no good, the quality will just get worse that way :mad:

[CWR03]

How would I re-crop the movie to get rid of the black bars, without losing quality?
Are you making file rips of the episodes or creating a DVD backup of the disk?

[KCode]

I am creating file rips, but it seams that somehow it is encoded as 16:9

[Awatef]

KCode, we can't help you this way. First you say, it is encoded in 4:3, now you say it is encoded in 16:9. First you say "without loosing quality", now you say you're doing file rips...

[CWR03]

It would also help to know which method you're using to create your file rips, but all you need to do is crop away the black areas and resize the output to 16:9 (or as close as you can get it). Losing quality would have nothing to do with cropping away the black bars in this case - that would depend entirely on your method of compression.

[KCode]

To answer everyone's questions. The back of the movie box shows that it is 1.78:1, but when I ran AGK using my normal settings I got this:

Source resolution: 720x480
Found NTSC source.
Source aspect ratio: 4:3

I was worried that it would be encoded as a 4:3 source (with the black bars in the file). I then was worried that I would have to reencode it (and lose some quality loseless->loseless) to make it a true 16:9 file. But it turns out that AGK droped the black bars from the file, and encoded it as a 16:9 file. Problem solved.

[Mug Funky]

FWIW, if the feature is being re-encoded anyway, you'll lose just as much quality going 4:3 to 4:3, then going 4:3 to 16:9. only difference is subjectively the anamorphic one will look better - software resizing + optional sharpening, etc will look better by far than scaling up in hardware on consumer equipment.

[kumi]

Isn't it true that encoding non-anamorphically requires more bits (for the black bars)?

[Mug Funky]

black bars take up bugger-all space. even less when the bars coincide with macroblock boundries (usually mod 16).

so the required bitrate for a given "quality" is less, but a little less of that is spent on actual picture information.

so an anamorphic encode might look blockier than a letterboxed encode at the same bitrate, but you could rest assured that all the bitrate is being spent on the actual picture.

so anamorphic is theoretically less efficient, but coding efficiency and perceptual quality are quite different. an anamorphic encode will look better so long as the setup supports it (a 4:3 TV with no 16:9 squish mode isn't ideal, especially considering the poor quality scaling in DVD players).

i'd definitely buy the 16:9 anamorphic version of a DVD over the 4:3 letterboxed version, so long as it's off the same transfer.

that said, there's not much to be gained from scaling it up yourself except a better looking upsize (limitedsharpen or lanczos beat crappy per-field bilinear any day).