Black bar on left side of bt878

[mikesown]

Right now I'm digitizing my old VHS-C tapes using a JVC SVHS camcorder with S-Video out. I have a Hauppage bt878-based card in my desktop and I'm using the btwincap driver. Right now, I notice a black bar on the left side of the screen. Also, there's some discoloration on the right hand side of the screen and head noise on the top and bottom of the picture. I'm currently capturing at 640x480. My question is this: can I cut off the edges losslessly in terms of pixel area? That is, I'd like to remove the "bad" parts of the image while still retaining the 640x480 framesize without enlarging/downsizing the image. I'm not quite sure how the card works, so I figured I'd ask here.

[FlimsyFeet]

If your final format is DVD, then you can capture at 720 x 480 and crop the left side to 704 x 480 , which is still a valid resolution for DVD.

If you want 640 x 480, for an Xvid/x264 encode or whatever, you might be able to select a cusotm resolution of 656 x 480 or something. Not really sure if you would be able to do this.

The other option, if you're using VirtualDub for capture, is to use the bt tweaker option to alter the left border, but this can be a bit of a pain (you need to get some dll's from DScaler and put them in the VDub folder, then you need to remember to reset every time you start a new capture)