cropping a mkv x264 file without reencode

[Daedalus01]

i encoded a movie (harry potter 1) and for some reason its 4:3 (the source is 4:3)

is there a way for me to crop the mkv file without reencode and loss of quality?

or do i have to do the cropping whilst encoding?

[SealTooGreat]

I think your problem is anamorphic encode without DAR signalization in MKV. Am I right?

[Daedalus01]

not sure what that means, but i dont think so. the encode is exactly the same as the source, which happens to be 4:3 for some reason

[SealTooGreat]

So why do you need cropping if you haven't mentioned black borders. Crop is used to get rid of it.

Can you provide more info about source... pal or ntsc? and could you upload the screenshot of your encode?

[check]

mkv can do post encoding cropping in a limited way. If the stream is h264, you can crop from the bottom and right of the video. If you decode with coreavc you can crop from all four sides. With mkvmerge, you can control this with the --cropping command.

I think what you want is to signal that the video should be displayed at 16/9 or 2.35:1 aspect ratio. When muxing with mkvmergeGUI, set the 'aspect ratio' for the video stream, which is in the 'format specific options' section of the stream config.

[bond]

best way to crop a video stream without video reencoding is to set the cropping flags in the video stream (not on mkv container level!)

maybe Trahald wants to add it to his tool h264info (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=123392)

[Daedalus01]

i want to crop to save space. there is no point having the extra top and bottom information since i am going to crop to 16:9 during post processing anyway.

therefore adding flags, changing default aspect ratio etc is pointless as it doesnt save space, it simply changes the default playback settings (which i can easily change whilst playback anyway)

[Selur]

"i want to crop to save space. "
then you have to reencode

[Daedalus01]

alright, thanks