Possible to remove black bars after encoding?

[zardano]

Early in my backup days I made the mistake of not properly cropping out the letterboxing before encoding to XviD. I have since re-encoded the majority of these old backups with proper cropping, but there are two movies that have been lost in the interim (one was borrowed and never returned, the other the kids destroyed).
Is it possible to crop out the black bars from an XviD without re-encoding? Cropping using the null transform filter in VirtualDub doesn't do it when I select "Direct stream copy" (to avoid re-encoding).
Is there any way to do this, or are my only options to just live with the uncropped files, or re-encode and suffer unacceptable quality loss?

[sysKin]

No.

In theory if the bottom bar is completely black (or completely solid colour) then you can remove it in 16-pixel steps, as long as you don't remove all of it. I'm not aware of any tool to do that though, and there's nothing you can do about the top/left/right one.

[zardano]

Thanks for the reply. I figured as much.

Same goes for an mpeg2 file I assume?

[Sharktooth]

yes...

[CWR03]

You can create an .avs script for the file with the proper adjustments made so that it plays back how you need it, however it only works for PC playback.

[mahsah]

Doesn't MKV actually have an option for this? (simelar to the the aspect ratio flag)

[Nicholi]

Doesn't MKV actually have an option for this? (simelar to the the aspect ratio flag)
Yes, allows you to crop on playback. Only supported by certain decoders though. I believe it was ffdshow that could only do the bottom and right edges, and CoreAVC (for h.264 only obviously) could do all four sides. Or it was CoreAVC which supported bottom/right and ffd did nothing. I can't recall, CoreAVC had the upper hand was all I remember.